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S1UD1ES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 SECOND SERIES. 
 
STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 Secmttj Series. 
 
 Romney — Constable — David Cox — George Cruikshank- 
 William Hunt — Prout — Meryon — 
 Burne Jones — Albert Moore. 
 
 FREDERICK WEDMORE 
 
 , sa. 
 AUTHOR OF "PASTOBALS OP FE4N0I 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 Richard Bentlby and Son, 
 New Burlington Street. 
 
 \\x%\m iit ©riritturg to itr Htujesig i\t tyuun. 
 1880. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Prologue ...... i 
 
 Bomney ..... 
 
 Constable .... 
 
 David Cox ..... 
 
 5 
 
 33 
 
 69 
 
 George Cruikshank . . . .101 
 
 William Hunt and Prout . 
 Meryon ..... 
 Burne Jones .... 
 
 Albert Moore .... 
 Epilogue ..... 
 
 153 
 
 169 
 
 203 
 227 
 241 
 
Thanlss are due to Mr. James Knowles, to Messrs. Chatto 
 and Windus, to Mr. Comyns Carr, and to Mr. 0. E. Doble, for 
 permission to republish such of the chapters of this book as haye 
 appeared in advance in the Reviews or Magazines these gentlemen 
 direct. 
 
 November, 1880. 
 
PROLOGUE. 
 
 r HE friend to whom I should have dedicated 
 these Studies, had I dedicated them at all, joins 
 to a particularly sensitive and learned appre- 
 ciation of Art the wisdom of never having written 
 anything about it. And because of his happiness in 
 uniting reticence with knowledge, he will be able to 
 ask me with impunity some awkward questions about 
 the contents of this little book ; why, for instance, 
 he may say, do I include this chapter on Romney, in 
 which I have placed, first in my volume, so sterile a 
 bit of work ? Well, it was partly because, though 
 the present series of these Studies is independent of the 
 First, I did want it also to be in some sense comple- 
 mentary of that, and, Reynolds and Gainsborough 
 
2 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 having in the First been briefly written about, it 
 seemed that in the Second so great a name as Romnefs 
 could not go unnoticed. There are people — some of 
 them very expert in great things like Physical Science 
 and Political Economy, though not perhaps in the 
 more humanising knowledge — who. do not know even 
 the little I have set down. 
 
 Again, it may be objected that in a volume of 
 Studies in English Art there is included a study of 
 Meryon, a wild but engaging personality, known to 
 some chiefly as a French bastard, who was the etcher 
 of Paris. The Study first appeared in the Nineteenth 
 Century, was reprinted afterwards by Mr. Thibau- 
 deau, only in the very limited edition of my descrip- 
 tive Catalogue of Meryon's prints, and has since 
 been asked for. It has a right to be here. Meryon's 
 father was an Englishman, and though Meryon him- 
 self was French by his quickly roused eagerness, his 
 restlessness, the fire and charm of his temper, it has 
 always seemed to me that he was English by the depth 
 of his imagination, by the poetical solemnity of his vision 
 of Paris. French art, pure and of the soil, has its 
 qualities-^its fascinating qualities too much ignored 
 — but of most French Art that may be said which 
 
PROLOGUE. 
 
 has been said of French literature of " the great cen- 
 tury" — the painter has painted, as the -poet has 
 written, " with an eye too steadily fixed on the 
 salon to be at leisure to follow the Muse into 
 solitary places of sublime inspiration." That is pre- 
 cisely what can never be said of Meryon, who was 
 only too lonely an artist and only too profound a poet. 
 With the world of drawing-rooms he had little to 
 do. 
 
 B 2 
 
ROMNEY. 
 
R O M N E Y. 
 
 1734— 1802. 
 
 Our interest in the English painters of the 
 eighteenth century is not generally of the 
 kind that is evoked by eminent genius and 
 undoubted mastery. In the work of these 
 eighteenth century artists, we watch plea- 
 surably the results of a graceful and patient 
 talent. A gentle taste, a sensitive eye, 
 and a hand lightly dexterous, are in place 
 of a splendid imagination and of a finished 
 excellence in technical labour. To the common 
 rule Romney is no exception. He is not even 
 the nearest to becoming an exception. Popular 
 opinion rightly ranks Sir Joshua as on the 
 
STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 whole ahead of him, though in much of the 
 technique of painting Romney was sounder — 
 his work has stood, while the experiments of 
 Sir Joshua have well nigh vanished. Critical 
 knowledge is able to say that Gainsborough is 
 Romney's superior. But there remains for 
 Romney, nevertheless, not the least enviable 
 position among the painters of the second half 
 of the eighteenth century. He wins upon us 
 by his charm. The work by which we re- 
 member him is not exceedingly ambitious, and 
 it is entirely successful. He is the pleasant 
 painter of the beautiful simplicity of children 
 and of the arch beauty of womanhood. He 
 is the swift and adept recorder of agree- 
 able impressions, such as it was his fortune 
 to receive every day. When we come to 
 know him a little we find of course that 
 he is more than this. But he is this pre- 
 eminently. 
 
 His personal career was one of some 
 vicissitudes — of disaster following upon tri- 
 umph — so that there is a further interest 
 that falls to him, if it is only the in- 
 
ROMNEY. 
 
 terest of pity. Romney began humbly, con- 
 tinued gloriously, and ended almost in shame. 
 Only to his enchantress — to Lady Hamilton 
 herself — were there reserved more curious 
 contrasts of condition ; and the life that went 
 out in an obscure lodging in Calais hardly 
 closed in greater humiliation than the life 
 which finished at Kendal. For Romney, 
 having been a stranger to his own people for 
 more than a generation, only went back to 
 them in his decrepitude. He required nursing, 
 and bethought him of his family. " He was 
 reduced to the condition of a child." 
 
 Two prolix biographers — not to speak of 
 subsequent essayists — have discussed his life, 
 and the second did so at what he conceived 
 to be the bidding of necessity. In 1 809, seven 
 years after the painter's death, his friend, 
 Hayley, at whose house in Sussex he had paid 
 almost an annual visit, published Romney's 
 " Life," and twenty-one years after that — for 
 even literary controversy was not hurried in 
 those times — the painter's son, the Reverend 
 George Romney, produced a Memoir. The 
 
io STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 latter author, we are told, when he first 
 meditated this Memoir, " would under any 
 other circumstances, than those in which he 
 was placed, have declined the undertaking, 
 but when he considered how much he was 
 bound by duty to protect the posthumous fame 
 of his revered relative, and saw with mortifi- 
 cation that all the accounts given of him and 
 of his works were either defective, false, or 
 injurious," — then, etc. 
 
 And so the Keverend George Bomney, 
 " formerly Fellow of St. John's College, Cam- 
 bridge," twaddles on — 'if he will allow me to 
 say so. For, a few inaccuracies apart, that 
 do not seem very harmful to us, in these latter 
 days, there was not really much to correct, 
 or much to be vexed with, in the volume of 
 Hayley. The first book, to this hour, holds 
 its own at least with the second. In both an 
 abundance of words somewhat obscure facts ; 
 in both a fair number of facts are present 
 beneath the verbiage. The especial grievance 
 of the son appears to have been that the earlier 
 biographer, upon whom he throws his re- 
 
ROMNEY. 1 1 
 
 proaches, had misrepresented the cause of that 
 long separation from his family which was the 
 most curious and the least creditable thing in 
 all the painter's history. But Hayley was not 
 in truth very guilty in that matter. He 
 passed with some lightness over the singular 
 circumstance — certainly did not blame his 
 friend with undue severity. The son of 
 Romney, however, thought it necessary to 
 make an explanation which had not occurred 
 to Hayley. These were the facts. Romney, 
 a Lancashire lad — born at Dalton in Furness, 
 in 1734 — had married young and rashly. He 
 saw that if he was to make the best of his 
 genius, he must leave his provincial home. 
 He must study in London, and he must make 
 himself known there. He had been getting two 
 guineas a-piece for " three-quarter portraits." 
 That he was going to be very distinguished 
 was the common expectation among those who 
 knew him in his own countryside; he had 
 been able to save as much as a hundred 
 pounds — " the produce of his industry and of 
 his wife's economy." It was divided equally 
 
12 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 between them; but — and the touch is cha- 
 racteristic — " he found it necessary after- 
 wards to send for twenty pounds more." 
 Presently, however, his money prospects bet- 
 tered. He made remittances to his wife. But 
 never, till his old age, did he permanently 
 return to her. Never did he arrange for her 
 coming to London. Twice he visited her, and 
 money, as he waxed more affluent, he con- 
 tinued to supply. He had two children by 
 her, and the one who survived to write his 
 memoir is careful to say that the painter never 
 intended to desert his family. The absence, 
 at first, was not meant to be final. It was 
 not even meant to be very long, as length of 
 time would be judged by the quiet patience 
 of those days. The insinuation "that Mr. 
 Eomney, in thus withdrawing from his family, 
 was acting upon a plan of pre-conceived and 
 deliberate abandonment, is so manifest a 
 calumny that it is almost unnecessary to con- 
 fute it .... It is quite improbable that a 
 father who was so capable of enjoying as well 
 as of delineating the playfulness and vivacity 
 
EOMNEY. 13 
 
 of children in general, could have been so 
 insensible to the same qualities in his own 
 (who were nob, as I have understood, deficient 
 in the graces and charms of infancy) as to 
 deliberately cast them off and to abandon them 
 for ever." The painter was morbidly sensi- 
 tive, morbidly shy. He had gone into London 
 as a bachelor — as a bachelor Society began 
 to recognize him. How difficult to avow, as 
 time went on, that somewhere in the pro- 
 vinces there had been a wife all the while, 
 and two children ! He intended no unkind- 
 ness — perhaps was hardly guilty of any — but 
 the position was difficult. Thus argues, with 
 more than filial duty and affection, the 
 Reverend Greorge Romney, when old age is 
 upon him, and he can view with impartial 
 equanimity the conduct to which he was sub- 
 jected when he was a child. 
 
 The chivalrous explanation of an offspring 
 that did not object to be neglected, has never- 
 theless some truth in it. The cause it suggests 
 — along with the painter's devotion to his art 
 as the dominant interest of his life — may really 
 
14 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 have been at the root of Romney's behaviour 
 in this matter. Romney on many sides was 
 anxious and undecided — the very type, the 
 capital example, of the artist unduly nervous, 
 of the artist of exaggerated but still quite real 
 sensibility, of the artist whose conception long 
 out-distances his execution — who is on fire 
 one day, cooled and quenched on another. 
 He was quick to feel, and his sensitiveness 
 bred a momentary impulse. Impressions 
 followed each other too fast for utility. To 
 utilise them they needed to be controlled. Set 
 purpose and continuous energy to execute it 
 were wanting to Romney. All his work shows 
 it. 
 
 The undisciplined ardour and exceeding zeal 
 which were barriers to the attainment of the 
 best work of maturity were not on that 
 account the less helpful to Romney in his first 
 years in London. He quickly struggled into 
 success. Established first at Dove Court, 
 near the Mansion House, in 1762, and moving 
 thence to Mew's Gate, Charing Cross, to be 
 near the Artists' Academy in St. Martin's 
 
BOMNEY. 15 
 
 Lane, and the Exhibition in Spring Gardens, 
 the spirited conception of his work and an 
 execution attractive even in its imperfection, 
 brought him abundant commissions, and 
 his Death of General Wolfe, in 1763, only escaped 
 a signal honour. The prize of the Society of 
 Arts had indeed been adjudged to it, when 
 powerful influence — Allan Cunningham de- 
 cides that it was no other than Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds's — led to the bestowal of the honour 
 upon Mortimer. How Romney himself received 
 the reversal of the decision no one positively 
 knows, for while one biographer says that 
 he "recognized its justice," another — the 
 painter's son — holds it to have been a wrong. 
 However it was received, the discussion of the 
 matter is made the occasion for telling us that 
 between rivals in a profession there can hardly 
 be genuine friendship. Romney was but a 
 young rival as yet ; no one had as yet said 
 of him that he and Sir Joshua divided the 
 town. But at all events, " not the slightest 
 intercourse at any time subsisted between Sir 
 Joshua and Mr. Romney." 
 
1 6 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 Two years after he had arrived in London, 
 Komney could afford to visit Paris. He was 
 there for six weeks. Lesueur's work struck 
 him by its grace and unction. Joseph Vernet, 
 the marine painter, was civil to him. Re- 
 turning home, he had risen in reputation. 
 Cumberland encouraged him, and has left 
 record of the charm of Romney' s talk in the 
 rare times when Romney was able to be in- 
 timate and chose to be free. Prosperities in- 
 creased. Romney was earning twelve hundred 
 a year before he went abroad again in 1773. 
 There was then a prolonged journey, and he 
 was much at Parma, studying Correggio. He 
 spoke of " painting in the Correggiesque style," 
 and such work as Titania, Puck and the Change- 
 ling, with its half-naked girl and frolicksome 
 boys, has indeed just the soft grace that 
 recalls the effeminate master. The type of 
 beauty he cared for, in ideal work, became 
 visible from 1783, when, in his full middle-age 
 and in mid career, Emma Lyon was first 
 known to him. She was the Lady Hamilton 
 of later years— the inspirer, he says him- 
 
ROMNEY. 17 
 
 self, of what was most beautiful in his 
 art. 
 
 Emma Lyon from that time onwards he 
 constantly painted, though not quite so often 
 as the dealers, who are fond of giving -her 
 name to his pictures, prefer to think. Often, 
 and especially in the later years, and in her 
 absence from England, the memory of her 
 face — sometimes a stray fancy of her, almost 
 a chance effect — came up upon his portraits 
 and on his more ambitious inventions. The 
 Sempstress — a picture beautiful in its simplicity 
 and quietude, delightful even in the print, in 
 which the charm of colour is denied — has been 
 shown lately to be from another model than 
 Lady Hamilton. It is the picturesque portrait 
 of a less celebrated beauty ; into it there stole 
 hardly even a memory of the enchantress. 
 But most often, both in portrait and in com- 
 position, it is Lady Hamilton that appears. 
 Romney was in Cavendish Square when first 
 she came to him. Gray's Inn, which had 
 followed Mews' Gate, had in its turn given 
 place to the gayer quarter. He had now settled 
 
1 8 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 himself, writes Hayley, of Cavendish Square, 
 " in that seasonable and fortunate abode." 
 There " Emma," under the name of Mrs. Hart, 
 was brought to him by Charles Greville, and 
 his first picture of her was that one of genuine 
 and spontaneous naivete* — the broad-hatted, 
 simply dressed girl with a lap-dog under her 
 arm that closes round it. There are two 
 successful engravings of it — one of them 
 printed very charmingly in colours, and a rare 
 thing for the collector. The fascination had 
 begun. 
 
 Which is the best of the many pictures painted 
 by Eomney of his favourite, is a question which 
 must go unanswered. The biographer most 
 able to speak says, that it was a certain Circe 
 painted some years after the first acquaintance 
 for Sir William Hamilton, and lost in its voyage 
 from foreign parts. But the Miranda of his 
 Tempest, was from her ; Sensibility was her por- 
 trait, and the Spinstress* She was painted as 
 
 * Lord Normanton's picture, bought under the hammer for seven 
 hundred guineas ; which ia, I am advised, the highest price ever 
 given in an auction room for a work of Romney's. 
 
ROMNEY. 19 
 
 a Bacchante, as Cassandra, as l'Allegro. Many 
 painters struggled for the advantage of pour- 
 traying her— she lives on Eomney's canvasses; 
 well in the finished work in which she is 
 identified with the creation of a poet ; best 
 perhaps in the impulsive and inspired sketches 
 which were quickly begun and quickly put 
 aside. A year or two ago, at an Old Masters' 
 Exhibition, such a sketch appeared of her 
 as Euphrosyne,* and the National Gallery 
 owns, as one of its two specimens of Eomney's 
 labour, some such another vivid sketch, large, 
 streaky, splashy — a successful, excited begin- 
 ning' — a rosy-cheeked girl, with golden-brown 
 hair, the head inclined on the right shoulder, 
 the moistened teeth white and a-gleam between 
 red lips — a canvas of cream and rose colour. 
 Eomney is a little exalted, but he is more 
 decidedly abased, when it is said of him, as 
 with rough truth it may be, that it is to 
 Lady Hamilton that he owes his immor- 
 tality. 
 In the ten years from 1775 to 1785, — the 
 
 * Excellently engraved in mezzotint by Shury, for Mrs. Noseda. 
 
 C 2 
 
20 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 years that followed his longest sojourn on the 
 continent and the exercise upon him, at Parma, 
 of Correggio's influence — Romney painted the 
 most famous people in England, beauties, 
 statesmen, divines, and men of law. But he 
 felt before the end of those ten years dis- 
 satisfied with his tasks, of which in one 
 twelvemonth the money reward was nearly 
 four thousand pounds. He knew that the 
 highest interest can hardly ever belong to an 
 artist whose work lies in chief within the 
 limited lines of portraiture, and is less a 
 creation than a chronicle. " This cursed por- 
 trait-painting — how am I shackled with it!" 
 And yet he lives for us to-day in part through 
 its charm. 
 
 In 1 791 Emma was to be married to Sir 
 "William Hamilton— " All the world," writes 
 Romney, " following her and talking of her, so 
 that if she had not more good sense than vanity, 
 her brain must be turned." Soon afterwards, 
 " I discovered an alteration in her conduct to 
 me," and Romney's was the double grief of the 
 threatened loss of a woman of whom he was 
 
ROMNEY. 21 
 
 fond, and of the most invaluable of his " pro- 
 perties " — she who stimulated most his faint 
 imagination. But, " I expect them again " — 
 Emma and Sir William — " the latter end of 
 this week, when my anxiety (for I have 
 suffered very much) will be either relieved or 
 increased as I find her conduct. It, is highly 
 probable that none of the pictures will be 
 finished, except I find her more friendly." 
 Then Hayley hastened to his companion's 
 aid, in the verses appealing to the fair as 
 " gracious Cassandra," and asking in the 
 painter's name — 
 
 " What cruel clouds have darkly chilled 
 Thy favour, that to me was vital fire ?" 
 
 And then his fears were set at rest. There was 
 still a chance for his happiness and for his art. 
 " Since she has resumed her former kindness, 
 my health and spirits are quite recovered." 
 
 He did not retain them long, however, for 
 though the Milton of 1792 shows his skill in 
 no decline, and though it is said of him that 
 "the decease of Reynolds quickened rather 
 
22 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 than relaxed his ambition," he became of more 
 variable temper, and often morose, — displayed 
 himself that which we know him by the series 
 of his portraits, a restless egotist, continually 
 hardened to the sufferings he did not behold, 
 selfish increasingly and increasingly desponding, 
 passing now into an old age not much to be 
 respected — his sharpened features shaped into 
 a scowl of bitterness, certainly of complete 
 disappointment. He is hardly all this in his 
 portrait of himself, though the germs of this 
 are in him. He is this completely in the 
 picture painted by Sir Martin Archer Shee — 
 engraved in 1810 for the "Fine Arts of the 
 English School " — and he knew it, and saw in 
 others the reflection of himself. For not later 
 than 1793, coming back to London from the 
 Sussex house of Hayley, where the daily sight 
 of Sussex peasantry had pleased him, he had 
 been repelled by his vision of the streets. " I 
 observed a sharpness of countenance in the 
 people I met, with passions so strongly marked 
 I suppose none could mistake. Deep design, 
 disappointed ambition, envy, hatred, melan- 
 
ROMNEY. 23 
 
 choly, disease, and povei'ty." Tn 1799, being 
 particularly ill, lie bethought him at last of his 
 kindred. Abandoning his schemes for im- 
 proved painting-rooms and quiet rest at 
 Kilburn or Hampstead, giving up his lease in 
 Cavendish Square, he went to Kendal, to his 
 wife, who — it is Hayley who is telling the 
 story — " had never been irritated to an act of 
 uakindness or a word of reproach by his years 
 of absence and neglect." So he relapsed to 
 the condition of infancy, was tenderly nursed, 
 mind and memory failed him, even con- 
 sciousness ; and he died — how lamentably far 
 from Cavendish Square ! " that seasonable and 
 fortunate abode," — he died at Kendal on the 
 15th of November, 1802. 
 
 Scarcely two years since, from the collection 
 of Mr. Anderdon, our National Grallery obtained 
 its second and more finished Romney, The 
 Parson's Daughter. It is one of those pictures, 
 numerous enough in the list of Eomney's 
 canvasses, in which the painter not only by 
 the simple process of bestowing a fanciful 
 
24 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 title, but by some larger license than usual in 
 the way either of idealisation or of more close 
 approach to the rendering of a special type, 
 has passed a little beyond the bounds of 
 confessed and stated portraiture — has, while 
 painting what is chiefly a portrait after all, 
 been yet occupied a little with the treatment 
 of a subject that was his own. As a study of 
 character it is more intelligent than powerful ; 
 as an exercise in colour it is especially admir- 
 able, for it is mellow and harmonious, and 
 avoids the heated reds which are common on 
 Romney's palette. Here, from a greyish-brown 
 background the head is detached, with its 
 mass of all but greyish auburn hair ; the brown 
 eyes dark and cool-coloured, and small too, 
 while in Romney's pictures derived from Lady 
 Hamilton they are of tener over large ; the face 
 seen in no vivid light, only a little flushed with 
 suffused colour — below it the creamy kerchief 
 and rich brown gown. A little bit of pale 
 green riband is wrought into the mass of hair 
 and saves the richness of the picture from 
 passing into heat. The face itself is very 
 
EOMNEY. 25 
 
 likely not quite worthy of the colourist's art. 
 I said it was intelligent rather than strong, 
 but even its intelligence moves but in narrow 
 places. The good and largely arched eyebrows 
 and the up- turned nose with its irregular 
 beauty, its expression of alert inquiry, are 
 rather spoilt by a mincing mouth, amiable and 
 weak — the mouth of a person who never quite 
 knows her own mind, or is too feebly obliging 
 to venture to act upon it. 
 
 This picture and a careful picture of an 
 ancestress of its present owner — Mr. Augustus 
 Craven — I mean the portrait of that Lady 
 Craven who had been Margravine of Anspach 
 — belong to the earlier order of Romney's 
 work — to the time at least when the controlled 
 hand could plod patiently through its task. 
 In artist's work, the careful work and the 
 careless are often, speaking roughly and of 
 course with a hundred exceptions, found to be 
 just the early and the late. Some sterling 
 merit is sure to belong to the careful, and 
 some charm to the careless, even if it be only 
 that of the dexterous exercise of the now 
 
26 STUDIES IN ENGLISH AST. 
 
 accustomed hand. And one of the surest tests 
 to which a painter can submit — a test that 
 settles very much the justice of his claim to be 
 remembered after most of his contemporaries 
 — is that test which asks whether the careless- 
 ness is but dashing and pleasant, or instinctively 
 learned, significant, and strong. In its luckiest 
 manifestations it can hardly help being the 
 first, but if what we call carelessness is in 
 truth the accomplished speed of mastery and 
 its unhesitating sureness, it will be the last 
 also. The work of Romney does not quite 
 fail under that test, but it does not quite 
 successfully stand it. In Romney' s century it 
 is Gainsborough who could have endured it the 
 best, and he chiefly in his landscapes. 
 
 But long before Romney passed into old 
 age — long before the time when it was perhaps 
 natural that very careful and considered labour 
 should wax irksome to him — he began to 
 scatter about him incompleted canvasses, some 
 of which bore on them his most brilliant 
 sketches with which no nervous anxiety and 
 no impatience short of his own could 
 
ROMNEY. 
 
 27 
 
 easily have been dissatisfied. We owe to 
 the restlessness of his middle life, quite 
 as much as to his solicitude, the un- 
 common array of graceful heads which are 
 here bits of direct portraiture, and here fanciful 
 variations upon a theme which, if we trace it 
 closely, is most likely Lady Hamilton. Sensi- 
 tive to a degree that we can hardly say that 
 Reynolds was, or Gainsborough, to the pure 
 grace of line — as the noble and complete por- 
 traits of the Gower children most decisively 
 show — Romney's most frequent pre-occupation 
 was hardly with that grace, but with a refined 
 lusciousness of womanly beauty only a little 
 less meretricious than the beauty sought after 
 by Greuze. Lady Hamilton, who in some of 
 the parts for which she sat — as Euphrosyne, 
 say, or the Bacchante — most fully realised that 
 beauty, had the complex or the double fascina- 
 tion that Romney wanted. She could be arch 
 and innocent, seductive and simple ; a child 
 and a coquette, angel and wanton. Greuze 
 himself would have appreciated a model who 
 had the advantage of making licentious- 
 
28 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 ness elegant, and at the same time purity 
 tolerable. 
 
 The method of Romney was one that a good 
 deal lent itself to the production of work of 
 which the sketchiness did not seem disagree- 
 ably incomplete. His flesh-palette was simple, 
 though here and again, as in the representation 
 of the bared arm of Mr. Henderson, the actor,* 
 he attained high finish in his representation of 
 flesh. His draperies — " which surpass," writes 
 Flaxman, " everything of the kind that I have 
 seen" — are noticeable for exceeding beauty, but 
 it is the beauty of great simplicity, and of a 
 simplicity not painfully sought for, but quickly 
 found. There is an admirable grace in the 
 easy concord of these large folds. It had not 
 been the aim of Gainsborough ; it was beyond 
 Reynolds ; its inspiration was more from 
 Greece than from Rome. The drapery was not 
 gorgeous, but slender and severe, even in all 
 the exquisiteness of its flow ; its folds scanty 
 rather than voluminous; it answered so to 
 Flaxman' s ideal, and his ideal was the highest. 
 
 * Mr. Henderson in the character of Macbeth. 
 
ROMNEY. 29 
 
 Again, an art that deals neither with the 
 subtleties of intellectual character — for Lord 
 Thurlow and the divines are after all not the 
 performances by which Romney will live — nor 
 with the tasks of minutely imitative painting, 
 has comparatively little to lose by a speed that 
 avoids completeness, or by an impatience that 
 forbids the realisation of even the intended 
 achievement. Yet from Romney's outcry 
 against the slavery of paid portraiture, the 
 restraints of definite commissions, it is plain 
 that he looked not indeed to his slighter, but 
 to his more ambitious and more finished work, 
 as that by which his reputation was to last. 
 In such anecdotal painting as Newton with 
 the Prism (the costumes are those of Eomney's 
 day, and not of Newton's,) he showed himself 
 a vivacious grappler with the difficulties of 
 incident painting — here is the philosopher ab- 
 sorbed and observant ; here is female beauty 
 looking merrily on, and perfectly satisfied, as 
 ever in the art of Romney, with the potency 
 of its charms. 
 
 In characterising Romney's work, the first 
 
3° 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 word to be used is grace, and almost the last 
 is grace. But the grace is shown in very 
 different degrees — nay, is itself almost of 
 different orders. The step is a long one from 
 the grace of Lady Hamilton, snatched from 
 the life — the single figure in one or other of 
 its accustomed poses — to the grace of the 
 dancing group, The Children of Lord Gower, the 
 noble canvas that has been reproduced in a 
 rare and magnificent mezzotint. There are 
 here four figures, a boy-child dancing, and two 
 dancing sisters, and one elder sister — no longer 
 a child, but scarcely a woman— striking music 
 out of the tambourine. Only their own genera- 
 tion was able to say what these figures were 
 as portraits; for us, the pictorial charm of 
 the incident, and its treatment so entirely 
 accomplished, banishes the thought of pro- 
 fessed portraiture. Romney, like the other 
 public favourites, his contemporaries, was 
 wont to be kind to his sitters, to soften asperi- 
 ties, to ignore defects, to make the representa- 
 tion agreeable before all things. That was 
 demanded in a time and by a class of society 
 
ROMNEY. 31 
 
 very sensitive to the charm of graceful contour, 
 fine carriage, and elegant gesture. But the 
 portrait- painter's kindness was not asked to 
 extend — and rarely, indeed, was it possible that 
 it should extend — to such entire amalgamation 
 as Romney gives us, in this instance, of that 
 which has to be painted, with that which it 
 may be pleasant to paint. A charm of beautiful 
 nature, still almost homely and familiar, is here 
 only less visible than the charm of ordered 
 art. He has not in the least sacrificed the 
 one to the other— you feel that truth to a 
 happy reality is the basis of this beauty. In- 
 dividual grace of movement is not forgotten : 
 a concord of wreathed and flowing line is most 
 of all remembered. It was not for nothing 
 that Romney, in the ripest period of his own 
 work in portraiture, still absorbed from masters 
 widely apart — now from Oorreggio, now from 
 Raffaelle, now from that thinner Raffaelle of 
 France, Bustache Lesueur — the qualities his 
 own later work was-to fruitfully bear witness of. 
 Some of George Romney's paintings are of his 
 own day, simply — those especially which pour- 
 
32 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 tray, for awe-struck admirers, the mild humanity 
 of the English eighteenth century ecclesiastic. 
 Some are but adroit renderings of the colours 
 and contour constantly before him in the face of 
 his most frequent model. Some, again, seem 
 too laboriously faithful to the lines of classic 
 art, or to the exaggerated softness that had 
 made the school of Parma popular. But there 
 are a few — and the group of the Gower chil- 
 dren is certainly the chief of them — in which 
 an artist to whom greatness was difficult, rose 
 almost to greatness; in which he splendidly 
 united noble traditions with the employment 
 of his personal observation, and gave, without 
 too much insisting on it, an accent of distinc- 
 tion from the elder world to the features of 
 to-day. 
 
CONSTABLE. 
 
CONSTABLE. 
 
 1776-1837. 
 
 The love of his home and country is at 
 the root of all that is best in the art of 
 Constable, and the English painter who 
 has most influenced the French was himself 
 of all English painters the most thoroughly 
 English. From the beginning to the end 
 of his life it was English scenery that he 
 pourtrayed, and it was of his own choice 
 that he pourtrayed it. Nothing drew him 
 away from the task that he had set himself, 
 the task which, like most great things that 
 have been done heartily, was so much a plea- 
 sure too. He was a young man when the 
 Peace of Amiens opened the gates of the Oon- 
 
 d 2 
 
36 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 tinent to English travellers, and he was still in 
 his prime when, after ten years interval of 
 war, the peace that was more lasting made 
 travel free again. With one or two exceptions, 
 the greatest men of his own time had been 
 abroad, and they were the first generation of 
 English painters that had gone beyond Eng- 
 land. Cozens was famous since he had been 
 in Italy. Old Crome, even, had journeyed up 
 from Norfolk and had crossed the Channel, 
 and painted the Boulevart des Italiens and the 
 Eishmarket at Boulogne. Turner had sought 
 his subjects in every nook of distant lands 
 little visited then, and had seized the mountain 
 forms with an accuracy that told of familiarity 
 as great with them as with the banks of the 
 Thames at Twickenham or at Kingston. But 
 nothing in that wide world, and nothing in 
 those changed circumstances, tempted Con- 
 stable ; the painter, from first to last, of Eng- 
 land only, and mainly of the Lowlands in which 
 he was born. 
 
 For even in England Constable did not much 
 seek for subjects. He painted the subjects 
 
CONSTABLE. 37 
 
 that were before him, and when he had 
 painted them once he painted them again. He 
 begins with the fields of his own county 
 (Suffolk). He is at "Weymouth with a friend, 
 and we have Weymouth Bay— the picture in the 
 Louvre. Friendship again, and not curiosity, 
 leads him to Salisbury. We have Salisbury, 
 Salisbury in various weathers; Salisbury in 
 study, picture and print. He wants to take 
 his family to Hampstead from the close dusti- 
 ness of Keppel Street or Charlotte Street; and 
 we have Hampstead Heath, a variation of it, A 
 Heath again, and it is still Hampstead. And 
 then, using the studies of his youth, his work 
 is once more in the corn-fields, by the streams 
 and locks of his own county : The Mill, Willy 
 Lott's House — and in one picture in every three 
 the square-set tower of Dedham Church rises 
 from among its quiet woodland to break the 
 line of the horizon. 
 
 But indeed this list (so suggestive and im- 
 pressive to us) of the subjects of his pictures 
 and of their repetition, is hardly needed to 
 convince us where his interests lay. His 
 
38 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 letters prove it. "I am doomed," lie says, 
 " never to see the living scenes that inspired 
 the landscape of Wilson and Claude. No, but 
 I was born to paint a happier land, my own 
 dear England : and when I cease to love her, 
 may I, as Wordsworth says, never more hear 
 
 " ' Her green leaves rustle, or her torrents roar.' " 
 
 And another letter explains still more the con- 
 centration of his interest. His friend has been 
 in the New Forest and speaks of a river. 
 " What river can it be ?" Well, not the river, 
 quite, for Constable ; for " the sound of water 
 escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten 
 planks, slimy posts and brickwork — I love 
 such things. Shakespeare could maka every- 
 thing poetical ; he tells us of poor Tom's 
 haunts among ' sheep cotes and mills.' As 
 long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint 
 such places. They have always been my 
 delight. ... I should paint my own places 
 best ; painting is with me but another word 
 for feeling, and I associate jny careless boy- 
 hood with all that lies on the banks of the 
 
CONSTABLE. 39 
 
 Stour. Those scenes made me a painter, and 
 I am grateful." 
 
 He was a miller's son : a country lad by 
 training as well as by birth ; so that the 
 country and the country-life presented them- 
 selves to him in a very different way from that 
 swift way of chance impression in which they 
 present themselves to the tourist, the occa- 
 sional traveller, the conscious seeker after 
 beautiful things. He knew the country and 
 the country-life profoundly. He amassed his 
 store of knowledge unawares in boyhood : 
 held it unconsciously : never adding item to 
 item with' the self -recognizing care of the 
 curious tourist or of the artist who goes out 
 into the fields with a definite purpose of 
 acquisition and work. But how the crops 
 ripened and the young ash grew, how the 
 cattle had a leader like the sheep, how the 
 sunshine was wont to break out in a showery 
 sky, how the slow stream- waters lagged dull 
 and grey under the dull skies of the fishing 
 weather, how the winds of late September 
 caught the sails of the windmill in the now 
 
4 o STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 bare flats —from off which all the corn is 
 gathered in — these things he did not notice 
 once with painful care, merely to reproduce 
 them ; but all the slow teachings of village 
 and farm were his during years of boyhood. 
 They surged up in his memory in after days 
 when on an easel in Charlotte Street there 
 stood a great canvas on which he was record- 
 ing just one impression out of many, of Flat- 
 ford Mill, of East Bergholt, of Salisbury 
 Plain. He was a miller's son : he felt himself 
 and his early life a part of that great wide 
 country. 
 
 BorU at Bast Bergholt on the i ith of June, 
 1776, he was placed at private schools of per- • 
 haps more than average merit : the master of 
 one of them had penetration enough to recog- 
 nize his early talent in design. But the boy 
 was destined for the Church. He opposed the 
 wish of his father, who thereupon decided to 
 make him a miller, and for twelve months, as 
 Mr. Leslie tells us in the Memoirs — which are 
 a sufficient source of information as to the 
 particulars of Constable's life— for twelve 
 
CONSTABLE. 41 
 
 months the youth was working in the mills : 
 the mill in the picture of Spring, known to us, 
 at least, by Mr. Lucas's mezzotint, is one of 
 those in which he worked. His habit of intense 
 look at the sky was contracted then, for a 
 wind-miller has need to study the sky as a 
 mariner the compass. In 1795 he went to 
 London, his father having consented to the 
 visit with the object of casting about among 
 artists for artists' opinions, to see what might 
 be the chance of the young man's success as a 
 painter. John Constable went to one Farring- 
 ton, who had been a pupil of Wilson, and 
 Farrington predicted the young man's future 
 excellence. His style of landscape, Farrington 
 said, would one day " form a distinct feature 
 in the Art." That was precisely what Con- 
 stable wanted. He hated nothing so much as 
 the creed that everything had been done 
 already. " Connoisseurs," he complained, 
 " think the art is already done." 
 
 It is soon decided that John is to have his 
 way, and after two or three years of preparing 
 he is admitted, in 1799, a student at the 
 
42 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 Royal Academy. Then begins the time of pro- 
 bation, when success trembles more than 
 once in the balance : a time prolonged in most 
 men's lives to the end of their youth : pro- 
 longed, alas ! in Constable's life, well nigh to 
 the end of all, for old age he hardly reached, 
 and middle-age was passed already when the 
 Royal Academy gave its full reward to the 
 painter whom Frenchmen had been the first 
 to honour. It is a long step from Constable's 
 youth, the youth of aspiration in the country, 
 the youth now of restless, now of hopeful and 
 placid work in London, to the late days of 
 middle-life, when he wrote of the honours be- 
 stowed on him, that they " had come too late, 
 for he could not impart them." The memory 
 of cherished plans that had been postponed for 
 years, the accumulation of bitternesses which 
 had made a proud and irritable spirit prouder 
 and more irritable still, rose up, we may be 
 sure, when that tardy recognition came. " I 
 am solitary," he wrote then of his new honours. 
 His wife had died : the autumn of his own life 
 had come; honours had lost their sweetness 
 
CONSTABLE. 43 
 
 for him. " They have come too late — I cannot 
 impart them." 
 
 Of course the Academy studentship de- 
 manded some practice in other branches than 
 the unpopular one of landscape. Constable, 
 like the rest, had made studies from the nude ; 
 lacking, as Leslie says, and as no doubt they 
 were, in outline, but with the familiar 
 " breadth of light and shade ;" approximating 
 to the qualities of the nude of Rembrandt 
 rather than to the nude of the accurate 
 draughtsman. Nymphs there are, ill-drawn, 
 finely lighted ; landscape, which never paid 
 well, paid worst of all in those early days, the 
 beginning of the present century ; and in 1 804, 
 Constable painted an alter-piece for Brantham 
 Church — the subject Christ Blessing Little Children 
 — and, later, he painted portraits; for these, 
 when he got commissions for them, the land- 
 scapes were of necessity laid aside. I have 
 never heard of anyone admiring the church 
 alter-pieces, except Constable's mother. She 
 indeed was affectionately overwhelmed by their 
 merits. A little later Constable copied pictures 
 
44 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 of Sir Joshua Reynolds for Lord Dysart. He 
 struck once or twice into wilder landscape than 
 that of his birthplace; visited Westmoreland, 
 where " the solitude of the mountains op- 
 pressed his spirits ;" and he must needs return 
 to the sociable noises of the creaking locks by 
 the Stour, with boat and boatmen ; to the mill 
 with the miller ; to the cornfield with the 
 band of harvesters ; to the cottage with garden 
 plot ; to the pony and rider, the sheep, the 
 dog, the red-waistcoated shepherd lad — to all 
 the familiar figures of the Suffolk lane and the 
 open fields of his boyhood. 
 
 Presently came the romance of love; less 
 romantic perhaps to him than to another. 
 His friend Fisher, rector of Langham, and 
 afterwards a high dignity in the Church, had 
 got him employed as drawing-master in a 
 London school, and here and there he sold a 
 picture or painted one on commission. But 
 his art was hardly yet the means by which he 
 could live, and marriage with a prospect of 
 long continued poverty was scarcely to be 
 thought of. But Constable was in love. He 
 
CONSTABLE. 45 
 
 is now more than thirty years old, and since 
 the girl's childhood he has known Maria, the 
 daughter of Mr. Bicknell, Solicitor to the 
 Admiralty, and the granddaughter of Dr. 
 Rhudde, who was rector of Bergholt, Con- 
 stable's own parish in the country. The for- 
 tune which should eventually come to Maria 
 was a considerable one; Constable's own 
 chances were indeed uncertain ; and the girl's 
 friends united in objections. Maria Bicknell 
 made no secret to her lover of her fondness for 
 him, and at the same time of her intention to 
 abide by the wish of her father. The wish of 
 the father waited somewhat prudently on the 
 wish of the grandfather ; the expectations from 
 Dr. Ehudde being too great to be conveniently 
 ignored. The reader of Leslie's Memoirs will 
 find many letters ; letters in which Constable 
 is content with the young woman's decision ; 
 letters in which he is not content with it ; 
 letters in which the young woman writes as if 
 life were eternal, and the engagement need 
 neither be cancelled nor soon carried out; 
 letters in which Constable urges her, and at 
 
46 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 last successfully, to marry on an income which 
 though small, now seems sufficient. The lady 
 softens — not in her love, which has been 
 avowed for years, but in her resolution — the 
 father somewhat relents, the grandfather some- 
 what relents, or at least both of these it is 
 now hoped may submit or acquiesce ; and at 
 last, Constable's own father having died, 
 Maria Bicknell's mother having died, and time 
 having passed on, the man, young no longer, 
 is married to the woman of his choice, October 
 the 2nd, 1816, at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, 
 Trafalgar Square. And the woman was a 
 patient and admirable spirit : his companion 
 for twelve years only, after all that waiting. 
 
 Three years after the marriage Constable is 
 made an associate of the Eoyal Academy, and 
 Dr. Rhudde dies, leaving his grand-daughter 
 an immediate legacy of four thousand pounds. 
 Bread at all events is secure for Constable, 
 and his pictures sell a little, but for small 
 prices. Commoner work that has the stamp 
 of fashion on it fetches five or six times 
 the money. Often, even after this time, it is 
 
CONSTABLE. 
 
 47 
 
 difficult to make Constable's pictures sell at 
 all. 
 
 For Constable did not only make it a point 
 of honour to paint the thing that he liked, but 
 he would paint it is own way only. He be- 
 lieved in the colours of nature, and, as much 
 as the great Dutch painters of interiors, in the 
 charm of fleeting lights, in the small import- 
 ance of subject, in the great value of 
 " effects ;" and the fashionable painters of the 
 day, with rare and notable exceptions, held 
 different beliefs.* We take Calcott as an ex- 
 ample. Smooth, conventional, a thing of 
 tradition and rule — how could the lovers of 
 that art have any perception of this which 
 came from nature without precedent, save pre- 
 cedent here and there in the manly landscape 
 of Gainsborough ? Yes, Constable was much 
 alone. Old Crome was then closing his lif e, his 
 provincial lif e of local recognition and reward ; 
 a life of honest often drudging labour; a 
 work which became an authority and an ex- 
 
 * He thought the pictures by De Hooch, in the Peel Collection 
 the beBt painted pictures he had ever seen. 
 
48 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 ample only when the painter was no more, and 
 Crome, in all his nature-seeking, in all his 
 realism, never ventured on the audacities of 
 Constable. Turner again was so many sided ; 
 prone then to catch the eye of the public with 
 glowing rendering of majestic sunset and 
 river and foreign city, as he had caught it 
 earlier by frank following here and there of the 
 landscape of Claude, or inspiration once or 
 twice from the more graceful and more studied 
 sides of the genius of Gainsborough. Con- 
 stable in London was the uncompromising 
 realist ; the one man who painted what he saw 
 — crudely even sometimes — and saw always 
 humble things, and would see no other. 
 
 In a sense, as I said, he was following in 
 Gainsborough's track, but that was in his 
 choice and love of common things ; not in his 
 treatment of them. Gainsborough, by reason 
 of his nature, exalted those things ; he gave to 
 those common things a beauty of arrangement, 
 a freedom of line, hardly at all times their own. 
 They appeared to him in their selected shapes. 
 Now Constable, following that track of Gains- 
 
CONSTABLE. 
 
 49 
 
 borough's — instead of the conventional ones, 
 beaten well and always till that very day in 
 England and in France — followed it with 
 nothing of compromise to the exigencies of 
 composition ; the arrangement of natural ob- 
 jects was not to be altered, nor the form 
 altered : only in altered lights and shades must 
 the effect be obtained and the dull scene turned 
 into a picture. (At least that was the theory. 
 But in painting Dedham Mill he always would 
 bring in the water-wheel at a point at which it 
 was not really to be found.) "Well, that method 
 of almost eschewing composition was evidently 
 and, it may even fairly be held, very rightly 
 a method which would be long in making its 
 way, and no one who believed in Constable 
 believed in the immediate acceptance of his 
 work. For the work struck in two great ways 
 at traditions which were firmly in power; it 
 demanded interest in objects and arrangements 
 that had no pretence to picturesqueness, and 
 it shocked the cultivated and traditional sense 
 by its audacious determination to stick to 
 Nature's colours. It did away with the con- 
 
5° 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 ventional treatment altogether. The triangles 
 of darkness that filled the foreground corners 
 so conveniently in the landscapes of the 
 schools — that had their use no doubt in throw- 
 ing the middle distance back a little, in leading 
 the eye to the things meant most to be seen — 
 those triangular spaces of foreground dark- 
 ness are not to be found in Constable. Again, 
 he had nothing to do with the accepted tradi- 
 tion that you must have something of autumnal 
 colour in a landscape. Late in life his own 
 colours tended indeed here and there to foxy 
 browns, but there was nothing of compromise 
 or concession in this. "Yes. That is very 
 well," said Sir George Beaumont to him, once, 
 looking at some scheme for a picture ; " that 
 is very well, but where are you going to put 
 your brown tree ?" Brown tree ! If there was 
 no brown tree in the landscape, there would 
 be none in the picture by Constable. 
 
 In 1824 the French recognised him. He 
 sent to the Exhibition in Paris his great picture 
 of the Hay Wain, and the talk of the artists 
 
CONSTABLE. 51 
 
 led the King to award him a gold medal, 
 " Think," lie wrote, " of the lovely villages 
 and peaceful farm-houses of Suffolk, forming 
 part of an exhibition to amuse the gay- 
 Parisians !" The picture having been seen 
 repeatedly in public, rests now in the collec- 
 tion of Mr. Henry Vaughan, and Mr. Vaughan 
 possesses also a sketch for the same subject — 
 the most delightful sketch of Constable's that 
 has fallen under my eyes. It is extremely 
 interesting to consider the two together ; they 
 illustrate so much of the artist's habit of work. 
 He was constantly treating what would be 
 called the same subject, but the subject was 
 as I said before of little importance ; or 
 rather, had he been pressed upon the matter, 
 he would have declined to admit that the sub- 
 ject lay only in the particular combination of 
 river and tree and mill. He never repeated 
 himself, though the names of his pictures 
 imply that he constantly did so. The " sub- 
 ject" of the Hay Wain has been engraved under 
 his. own supervision, and called in the en- 
 graving the Mill by the Stour. Here again, for 
 
 E 2 
 
52 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the third time, the treatment is varied : the 
 lights and shades suggesting other hours than 
 those chosen at first, and making in reality 
 another picture. Mr. Vaughan's sketch is the 
 freshest and brightest : the light and shade 
 yield here in importance to the presentation of 
 sparkling and varied and delightful colour. 
 A mill and a mill-cottage are on the bank of 
 the stream : the high lights on the house- 
 corner in the print are absent from the sketch, 
 ■which is silvery, pearly, gentle, without 
 violence of contrast. Then turning from print 
 and study to the great picture itself, we see 
 in it more of subject, as befits its size ; now 
 the hay- waggon that gives the title to it is in 
 the shallow stream ; two horses are there ; two 
 men are in the waggon ; and on the further 
 bank the delicate lines of a young ash rise for 
 the first time against the sturdier trunk and 
 bough which Constable would do nothing to 
 beautify. Tor Constable never gave to com- 
 mon trees a dignity and beauty not their own. 
 An ill-grown elm in the natural landscape was 
 ill-grown still in his picture. Only he loved 
 
CONSTABLE. 53 
 
 now and again to set against it the delicate 
 beauty that was as natural as its own uncouth- 
 ness, and so the young ash rises — his favourite 
 tree ; he exclaimed bitterly on the brutality of 
 nailing to an ash-tree the board with that 
 warning to trespassers, "trespassers will be 
 prosecuted," so familiar in an English wood. 
 
 The success in Paris in 1824 was followed 
 by success at Lisle in 1826. It was the Hay- 
 Wain — Mr. Henry Vaughan's picture — that 
 was shown in Paris : the White Horse — painted 
 for Constable's friend, Archdeacon Fisher, of 
 Salisbury, who was one of his staunchest 
 helpers — that was exhibited at Lisle. At Lisle 
 there was a gold medal ; but success in Eng- 
 land was still hardly grasped by the painter ; 
 money came to him slowly : he still had difficult 
 times. He and his wife and several children 
 lived perhaps not always in the most economical 
 of ways, now at Charlotte Street, Fitzroy 
 Square, and now in the suburb of Hampstead. 
 
 One is glad to chronicle the French appre- 
 ciation : sorry to remember the English neglect. 
 But it would be a mistake to impart wholly 
 
54 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 blame to the English criticism of that time, or 
 to see an amazing penetration in the judgment 
 of the French. For, in the first place, it was 
 given to Constable almost alone to reveal to 
 France with what a modern spirit landscape 
 could be treated in modern art. We, in Eng- 
 land, had at that very time some other work well 
 worthy of admiration. The French had never seen 
 it. Our water-colour school had arisen, though 
 Constable was not of it — his colours in water- 
 colour being strangely harsh and jarring when- 
 ever he is anxious to pass beyond the harmoni- 
 ous and happy indefiniteness of the immediate 
 sketch. That time was the best for De Wint, 
 for Copley Fielding ; Turner had done, already, 
 work which he would never surpass. David 
 Cox, it is true, was as yet not in sight of his 
 greatest period, and Crome had worked in the 
 country, where Cotman was working at that 
 day. Some recognition, though as yet an in- 
 adequate one, great modern landscape — the 
 landscape of these men — had received in Eng- 
 land. At the Academy it was still at a dis- 
 count. In the second place, the work that 
 
CONSTABLE. 55 
 
 Constable was doing was not all admirable. 
 Some of his followers in France have learned 
 to present the truth of his art in a form more 
 constantly agreeable. Constable's sense of 
 beauty, even of the beauty of the common 
 things, though powerful, was not the subtlest, 
 was not always the most refined. Let us be 
 frank about it. If, going into the National 
 Gallery, we look first at the Valley Farm and 
 the Cornfield, and then at Mousehold Heath and 
 the Windmill — .the neighbouring works of 
 Crome — it is the pictures of the Norwich 
 master that will give us the most abiding and 
 satisfying pleasure. I think, for my own part, 
 that notwithstanding the celebrity of the Corn- 
 field — its boasted pre-eminence — our national 
 collection is not wholly fortunate in what it 
 has of Constable. The Norwich master is better 
 represented. One sees, of course, that Con- 
 stable wrestled even more boldly with Nature : 
 strove more continually to bring the variety 
 and truth of her aspects into his art. But in 
 the truth as he gives it us there is sometimes 
 a certain crudity, a certain harshness and un- 
 
56 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 couthness, which Crome — as great a realist, 
 but a subtler one — somehow avoided. A sense 
 of the harmonies of colour was not always 
 present to Constable : the harmonies of 
 form he here and there voluntarily ignored 
 and despised. Bast Bergholt was beautiful 
 enough for him — the square house where 
 he was born, with the ugly wall around 
 it. He would give to it, in the study and 
 print, such interest, such fascination even, of 
 light and shade, as should make it pleasant 
 even to the spectator who beheld it with no 
 affectionate associations like his own. Yes, 
 and it was a manly endeavour ; but the painter 
 of balanced gifts would hardly have been satis- 
 fied with that. Le dernier mot de VArt — you do 
 not look for it in all of the most celebrated of 
 the pictures of Constable. 
 
 Now and again he exercised a stricter spirit 
 in selection ; painted under the influence of a 
 dominating sentiment, and it may be a senti- 
 ment of more profound solemnity; now and 
 again also he worked at common things with 
 a finer eye, and pourtrayed the common trees, 
 
CONSTABLE. 57 
 
 and fields and house-tops, the daily skies and 
 air and weather, with a freshness and pre- 
 cision, a sharpness, happiness of light, in 
 which he is almost alone. Of the stricter 
 spirit in selection, of the sentiment more 
 solemn, there are two notable examples : the 
 first of them A Dell in Helmingham Park 
 (exhibited at Manchester, in 1857, under the 
 misguiding title of A Rustic Bridge), the second, 
 Cenotaph at Coleor ton r— the monument to Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds in the grounds of Sir George 
 Beaumont. In Helmingham Park several forest- 
 trees stand on the further side of a small 
 stream ; in the Cenotaph picture — painted so 
 late as 1833 — it is autumnal trees of noble 
 birth and ancient line that are grouped grandly 
 and massively in solemn shadow behind the 
 light that strikes on the square-set monument. 
 The introduction of trees of a form so noble 
 and abiding is an exceptional occurrence in 
 Constable's work. 
 
 But now, for the finer eye in its happiest 
 perception of quite common things — for the 
 sharper and more precise hand, working with 
 
58 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 a clearness far enough still from any pettiness 
 of. definition— we look first at the Cottage in the 
 Cornfield, where the air is felt, that blows 
 lightly over the wheat between the cottage 
 and the field-gate, or look at the fresh and 
 exquisite study for the Hay Wain picture, which 
 I have mentioned before, or look last at the 
 Romantic House* Only an eye that saw beauty 
 quickly, and often where it was least alluring, 
 could have seen it at all in this "Romantic House" 
 which is no ivy-cloaked tower, nor gabled 
 cottage nestling among greenery, but a white 
 painted house, tall and straight, its uniformity 
 broken by nothing more " romantic" than the 
 quaint lines of a single projecting upper bow- 
 window of the eighteenth century, of the sort 
 that gave charm to the otherwise flat-fronted, 
 flat-backed houses that stretched in numbers, 
 until lately, along the wharves of "Wapping. 
 But this house of Constable's is on Hamp- 
 stead Heath : it stands well up on the highest 
 ground, and you look at it from below, where, 
 
 * A picture still in the possession of the painter's family. 
 
CONSTABLE. 59 
 
 when Constable drew it, there was still a pool 
 in which dusty-flanked horses watered, and 
 from which some rough shrubberies rose, 
 topped by the slender waving lines of a poplar, 
 of which Constable at Hampstead learned the 
 grace. And it is with a touch quite exquisitely 
 decisive that he has seized the everyday plea- 
 santness of the groupings here ; the pool, the 
 green-growth behind it, the white-painted com- 
 fortable middle-class house above, with its quaint 
 window-lines, the row of straight railings on 
 the flat roof, and the gentle sway of the poplar 
 in the sunny and breezy air. For pleasant 
 combinations of common things, and for truth 
 of tone at once unflinching and delightful, I 
 know of nothing more noteworthy than this. 
 
 In his larger work, form became more in- 
 definite as time advanced, and even in the 
 skies the twirl of the brush was apt to give 
 place to the broad dab of the palette knife. 
 He attached increasing importance not to the 
 lines of the design, but to the forms of the 
 impasto. His friends knew that he did ; and I 
 have been told that long after his death, Leslie, 
 
60 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 when calling on the possessor of the Hay Wain, 
 closed his eyes and passed his finger-ends over 
 all the thickly painted portions of that picture, 
 to trace the shapes in which Constable had 
 laid on the colour. Leslie, his friend, knew 
 that there was no carelessness in that seemingly 
 hasty scrape and fling. 
 
 Appreciation of his work from men like the 
 poet Rogers, Vernon, the founder of the 
 Yernon Gallery, and others beyond the limited 
 circle of his own friends, of whom the painter 
 Leslie and Archdeacon Fisher were among the 
 firmest, gave good hope to Constable in his 
 latter years, but these years were not without 
 their added bitterness, though they were con- 
 soled in part by Constable's growing apprecia- 
 tion of imaginative literature : Wordsworth, 
 and even such a book as Thomson's Seasons were 
 real delights and comforts to him. I said 
 " imaginative" literature, but in truth it was 
 rather the descriptive, and English landscape 
 in the poets was what best interested him who 
 was devoted to landscape in Nature and to 
 landscape in Art. But it was only in 1829 
 
CONSTABLE. 61 
 
 that lie was made a full Academician ; received, 
 that is to say, the final recognition. In 1828 
 died the wife to whom he had written when 
 the long difficulties of their marriage had been 
 overcome, " I look forward to many happy 
 years with you; but we might have been 
 spared a world of pain." The children were 
 left upon his hands, and there were several of 
 them. His relations with each were of the 
 most affectionate kind ; the nature that could 
 look with such a passionate love on the familiar 
 fields had much to spare for all the familiar faces. 
 His letters are full of the praises of his daugh- 
 ters ; his friends delighted in them for their 
 pleasant and sunshiny ways. In 1835, the 
 second boy went to sea ; he would be a sailor 
 and nothing else ; Constable was busy fitting 
 him out as a midshipman. " I try to joke about 
 him," the father writes, " but my heart is 
 broken at parting with him." And Constable's 
 days did not wax merrier, for ill-health fell 
 on him, and appreciation, when it came, did 
 not come in abundance. Trying, in those last 
 years, to familiarise the public with his work 
 
62 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART, 
 
 through the publication of a series of mezzo- 
 tints after his pictures, he wrote that it would 
 never do to exclude a ruin from the list of sub- 
 jects : a ruin was the symbol of himself. He 
 used to thank Heaven that in his art he had 
 no imagination, but I know he had enough of 
 it in his life, and he aggravated trouble by 
 brooding on it. Once he confided to his friend 
 in a night walk, in Oxford Street, that money 
 losses had disturbed him just then, not so 
 much for their mere amount as for the abuse 
 of trust and the abuse of his good intentions 
 on the part of others which their occurrence 
 implied. But he quickly changed the subject, 
 and crossed the road to speak to a child hurt by 
 some slight street accident, gave her a shilling, 
 then parted from his companion, laughing. 
 Only the next night sudden illness seized him, 
 and half-an-hour afterwards he was dead. 
 
 They buried him at Hampstead, the suburban 
 place of which he had been fond; the place 
 which had been wrought into so much of his 
 painting. 
 
 Several times he had painted Hampstead 
 
CONSTABLE. 63 
 
 Heath : at one time the most open and deserted 
 part of it; at another, the rise and fall of it, where 
 washerwomen establish their drying-ground; 
 then, a bit of common grass-land lying under a 
 hedge that encloses the first of country fields — 
 a disused wagon standing perhaps by the road- 
 side ; sunlight on a hayrick, or dull showers 
 shutting in the view. It was quite character- 
 istic of Constable that Hampstead should have 
 contented him for any other besides his first 
 purpose of a sober and dignified dwelling-place, 
 very suited to the quietness of his life and 
 temperament. But no pure colourist, en- 
 amoured of blue sky and the true green 
 meadows, could have been satisfied with its 
 hues, grimy and gray in easterly winds with 
 the smoke of London. He made the best of 
 it in his life and the best of it in his art. It 
 was only one commonplace thing the more, for 
 one whose genius lay in the power to make 
 the commonplace interesting. And to Hamp- 
 stead they brought him up for his burial. 
 
 Gainsborough had been buried as simply as 
 Constable ; there was no pomp of the Abbey 
 
64 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 for him, only a quiet resting-place in the 
 churchyard of Kew. But at least it was on 
 that side of London where the natural scenery 
 most nearly approaches to the elegance and 
 the distinction which are part of the charm of 
 Gainsborough's art; it was in the low-lying 
 land, where graceful trees rise and bend over 
 the broad sweep and windings of the river. 
 Constable's grave, in Hampstead churchyard, 
 is approached first by a mean lane from the 
 High Street, and then by the quaint and dull 
 old-fashioned red-brick Row — Church Eow — 
 in our day almost a last suburban refuge for the 
 apostles of Queen Anne. There is little beauty 
 of outline, little purity of colour, in the place 
 where he rests. But it has the one inalienable 
 charm of upland places — a wide tract of sky 
 — and the mean trees that rise here and there 
 over the dull gravestones are bowed at all 
 events by the wind and weather that he loved. 
 
 A word, finally, about the reproductions of 
 Constable's work — those mezzotints on which 
 he counted a good deal for the spreading of 
 
CONSTABLE. 65 
 
 the fame for which he was always so anxious. 
 They were twenty-two in number, and were 
 meant to be bought by the public in occasional 
 parts — a favourite way of publication even 
 in Constable's day. Lucas, the engraver, a 
 friend of Constable's, was charged with the 
 engraving of them, and they were published 
 (so far as publicity can be said to have been 
 ever achieved), as English Landscape, by John 
 Constable. They came out in 1830 and tbe 
 next few following years, the years only just 
 preceding Constable's death. But other mez- 
 zotints exist, beyond the twenty-two of the 
 professed series ; two or three of high merit ; 
 many again that want the decisive baud which 
 the painter himself bestowed on those pub- 
 lished ones which were to represent him. 
 Later issues of the work, since Fame has 
 really come- to him, include many of the bad 
 ones and contain the good ones only in bad 
 conditions of the plate. Engravers' proofs 
 and early "open-letter proofs" are alone 
 worth having. Even with these the question 
 will arise — the question we are interested to 
 
66 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ABT. 
 
 answer — how far do they represent the varied 
 and vivacious art of Constable? At their 
 best, they are suggestive. Their effectiveness 
 is evident. By their broad treatment of light 
 and shade in masses, they recall the com- 
 positions of the master — recall the weighted 
 trees in impenetrable shade, the sunny flats, 
 the broken wind-driven clouds that scud over 
 the plain. By their, loose large touch, they 
 recall his handling, as no line engraving can 
 hope to do. They fail, however, as black and 
 white must necessarily fail, to give some 
 special qualities of Constable's work — the 
 freshness and the moisture of the fields, the 
 dank herbage, the sparkle of sunshine in 
 showery weather; its sparkle most of all on 
 vegetation. He knew himself what they 
 lacked, and was at constant pains to improve 
 them — clung to them, and yet was never quite 
 satisfied with them ; often, and justly, found 
 their blacks " sooty." A little blown smoke 
 from a cottage here, a point of light there, 
 a relieving gleam — the directions for all these 
 are on proofs that were submitted to him. 
 
CONSTABLE. 67 
 
 Yarmouth is of a rare refinement of effect ; Old 
 Sarum is solemn and weird ; Weymouth Bay, in 
 its best state unsurpassable ; Spring is one of the 
 calmest and most cheerful of Constable's sub- 
 jects — a great stretch of arable land under 
 grey March skies broken with sunshine. On 
 the whole the result fairly contented him ; but 
 the touch of his own hand being absent from 
 the plates themselves, not all their picturesque- 
 ness nor all their broad translation of the 
 character of his work — that formless art, deal- 
 ing with Nature not subtly but heavily and in 
 great masses — can allow even the simplest 
 amateur to accept them as in any sense one 
 with such complete expressions of a master 
 as the great Turner prints, the Liber Studiorum, 
 which were executed in part by Turner him- 
 self and in part under his close correction. 
 But what Lupton did for Turner in the un- 
 finished series of mezzotints known as the 
 Ports of England — what was done for Turner 
 again, though sometimes less completely, in 
 the Rivers of England — that David Lucas did 
 for Constable. The precise process adopted 
 
 f 2 
 
68 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 for the Liber Studiorum would perhaps have 
 served Constable hardly better. That compara- 
 tively formless art of his could hardly have been 
 exalted by the insistance, in its reproduction, 
 of the definite line, the etched line, of the 
 Liber, seeing that everything approaching to 
 the definite line, and the learned composition 
 which that implies and sometimes emphasizes, 
 was absent from Constable's canvas. 
 
DAVID COX. 
 
DAVID COX. 
 
 1783—1859. 
 
 Criticism has been strangely little occupied with 
 the "god of Art" of the -well-to-do British 
 householder who cares about pictures. But 
 perhaps it has been felt that the simple force 
 of David Cox has much defied analysis, or 
 hardly repaid it. His very merits as well 
 as his faults are simple, plain, and rough. 
 In his art and in his life he was manly, 
 blunt, straightforward — what we call " Eng- 
 lish." 
 
 So much of what he painted appealed to the 
 rapid gaze and the immediate opinion. A 
 moment's turn to the wall, and his drawings 
 could be tasted and enjoyed. He had few 
 
72 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 subtleties that must be waited for — only in 
 his latest art some secrets that must find you 
 in a mood to receive them. The hurried ob- 
 server of nature can value much in David 
 Cox, for he depicted in the main, and with 
 audacious truth, her first features, her most 
 familiar looks. Therefore his art was for the 
 hasty man, perhaps even more than for the 
 careful collector and the slow student. It 
 was for the bustling even more than for the 
 busy. If Manchester must have art, David 
 Cox's, it seemed, was the art for Manchester. 
 
 The artist with whose favourite achieve- 
 ments his own had most in common was un- 
 doubtedly Constable; and Constable, had he 
 painted much and easily in water colours, 
 might have become, though hardly in his 
 own day, as popular as David Cox. But 
 Constable had two disadvantages, two draw- 
 backs to popularity : he died before the land- 
 scape art of Cox had approached its late 
 perfection — long before the public existed that 
 was able and willing to value it and such as 
 was akin to it— and his use of the material 
 
DAVID COX. 73 
 
 destined immediately to be more popular was 
 but a fumbling employment ; that is, his 
 water-colours were suggestive and even suffi- 
 cient, if he was careful to aim at suggestion 
 alone, but disappointing, harsh, unskilled, if 
 he sought to realize and to complete. Con- 
 stable's art reached its perfection when Cox's 
 was tentative and immature. Constable was 
 original and a master when Cox was seeking 
 his way; and the honour of precedence, the 
 honour .of discovery, will always be his. But - 
 Cox, in that slighter art of water colour which 
 he made so much his own — each trick of 
 which he turned and wrought so adroitly that 
 his work came at last to seem not a task but 
 a very revel of familiar play— Cox, in that 
 slighter art, came near to Constable's effects ; 
 nay, even presented the like of them with a 
 richer variety. They were both painters not 
 so much of abiding nature as of fleeting and 
 vanishing things. That has been said before 
 and seen often — that the facts of Nature were 
 less interesting to them than the caprices of 
 weather and wind. But we distinguish here ; 
 
74 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 for in painting these changing, these transient 
 effects, Constable had the greater unity of 
 impression ': he was dominated by one idea : 
 nearly each work of his expressed a very 
 personal sentiment that possessed him at the 
 time, and the line of English verse from the 
 new poetry of nature that he wrote under it 
 was not chosen with curious care out of a 
 book of extracts, but was with him, in his 
 mind, and had suggested the thing. But 
 Cox was not so often the painter of sentiment 
 as of material facts or physical sensations. 
 His art of painting hardly sought either to 
 rival or to supplement, by its appeal to the 
 eye, the achievements of our art of Literature. 
 He rarely invented, rarely imagined, rarely 
 even combined. But in that strong and 
 simple and never subtle fashion of his own, 
 which a thousand water colours reveal to the 
 world, he felt and saw keenly, and keenly 
 recorded. And with the late ripeness of his 
 art came the unsurpassed instinct in selecting 
 the thing it was his business to record, and in 
 rejecting the detail, the accessory, with which 
 
DAVID COX. 75 
 
 that later art of his had little enough of 
 sympathy. Thus, Cox from the first confined 
 his work within the limits proper to pictorial 
 art ; and, at the last, as to the language that 
 his art employed — as to his method of ex- 
 pression — he preferred to the subtleties of 
 elaborate discourse the pregnant brevity of 
 more summary speech. Simple from the first 
 in his theme, he became simple also in the 
 delivery of his phrase. 
 
 David Cox was the son of a blacksmith, and 
 was born near a forge.* He had little physical 
 strength in his boyhood, and the Birmingham 
 working man, his father, was content for him 
 to enter, in the easiest humble way, on the 
 practice of art, which he cared for almost in 
 childhood. Apprenticed first to a locket 
 painter, the indentures were cancelled, or had 
 lapsed, on the master's death, and the boy 
 Cox, lacking work, engaged to prepare colours 
 
 * One of the most vivid sketches of his later days has for its sub- 
 ject the red glow of the forge at Bettwys, in contrast with the weird 
 brown-grey light over the mountains above it. 
 
76 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 for the Birmingham scene-painters, and from 
 that, without loss of time, became able to help 
 in the painting. For four years he was with 
 the company at Birmingham ; then travelled 
 with its manager to Leicester; and other 
 country wanderings begat a love of landscape, 
 but the travelling, on actors' "circuit" of 
 those days, wearied him. He wanted settle- 
 ment, and in 1803, being twenty years old, 
 he came up to London. He had a modest 
 appointment in the scene-loft at Astley's. 
 Near to Astley's, Amphitheatre was an art 
 shop of that period — Palser's, a dealer in 
 water colours, then in the "Westminster Eoad, 
 but destined to be afterwards celebrated in 
 Covent Garden. The sight of the drawings 
 there roused or renewed whatever ambition of 
 David Cox's had slumbered or been relaxed. 
 He was able to make the acquaintance of 
 John Varley, who was among the leaders of 
 the art. Varley encouraged him, and from 
 scene-painting Cox proceeded to study draw- 
 ings for the folio and the cabinet. In 1805 he 
 went to Wales for a fruitful holiday. Gra- 
 
DAVID COX. 77 
 
 dually, though in humble form, his career 
 was shaping itself. He made a series of 
 drawings to be sold at a few shillings a-piece, 
 and bethought him of the usual employment 
 of youth and obscurity in art — the giving of 
 lessons, on terms left generally for the pupil 
 to fix. 
 
 Cox, on first coming to London, had been 
 placed by his mother, who was a careful 
 woman, thoughtful beyond most of her station, 
 in the house of a Mrs. Ragg, likewise a sober 
 person and of good reputation — the mother of 
 daughters of whom one was to become the 
 wife of Oox. In 1808, while still young in age, 
 but with the temperament of a man whose youth 
 is short and maturity long, David Cox married 
 Mary Ragg. She was a little older than he 
 was, but he did not feel that, and they lived 
 -together in much calmness for well nigh forty 
 years. Her intelligence and common sense were 
 often useful to him in supplementing his own, 
 and she had interest in Art and in many things. 
 'Living in a cottage on Dulwich Common, 
 and employed now entirely in the department 
 
78 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 of his final choice, Cox made some slow pro- 
 gress in his profession ; and though a poor man 
 still, and with little demand for his work, he 
 must have stood sufficiently well in the 
 estimation of his brother artists, for in 1813 
 they made him a member of the Society of 
 Painters in Water Colour, to whose exhibitions 
 he, through many viscissitudes, remained a 
 constant contributor for not much less than 
 half a century. The next year to that, he was 
 appointed teacher, at the military College, Bag- 
 shot ; but the work there was irksome to him, 
 and he began to wish for a residence less costly 
 even than his humble one of London, and for 
 the opportunity of regular study amongst 
 country scenes. A good boarding-school at 
 Hereford offered a hundred a year to a capable 
 drawing master ; and Cox accepted the post — 
 so slenderly equipped just then, as to material 
 resources, that he had to borrow from Lady 
 Arden forty pounds before he could accomplish 
 his removal. She was one of those who liked 
 his straightforward character and painstaking 
 work — his simplicity of manner and of heart. 
 
DAVID COX. 79 
 
 Those times, when England suffered from the 
 impoverishment of war, were hardly times in 
 which any art but the most thoroughly accepted 
 was likely to receive a superfluous or even an 
 adequate reward. And though Cox, even 
 in the first dozen years of his practice, was 
 making good his right to a fair place among 
 contemporary artists of the second rank — 
 nay, was well abreast of many who were 
 accounted before him — his art, at that 
 time, gave, as I cannot too much insist, no 
 faintest sign of possible rivalry with the 
 art of the greatest. In narrow circum- 
 stances, then, David Cox, his wife, and their 
 young boy, for whom the father had already 
 planned the benefits of the Hereford 
 Grammar School, settled at Hereford, Cox 
 still hoping to gain gradually some hold on the 
 picture-buyers of London, or scheming the 
 publication of designs in sepia as well as of an 
 essay on painting in water colour. But Fame 
 had still to be long waited for, and Cox was 
 not yet doing the work which was to deserve 
 it. Once a year he journeyed to London — a 
 
80 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 two or three days' coach journey — to see the 
 Exhibitions and to keep himself a little in the 
 memory of the artists in town ; but I suppose 
 it was the secluded and restricted life of those 
 years at Hereford that gave to Cox the pro- 
 vincial stamp permanently — the restriction and 
 seclusion coming not then at a time when he 
 found his mind full enough to profit by them, but 
 at a time when he should more swiftly have re- 
 ceived and developed, when he should have been 
 open to influences more numerous and various. 
 Probably, however, his character gained in in- 
 tensity what it lost in breadth. When he felt 
 and admired, he felt and admired strongly. In 
 politics, he was a Liberal of that day. In art 
 he made no special attempt to study the 
 received masters of any great school ; but at a 
 time when the genius of Turner was still under 
 the discredit of novelty, he — half a dozen years 
 before he left London — had put himself down 
 enthusiastically as a subscriber to the Liber 
 Studiorum. Eventually he contemplated a 
 work of his own in distant competition with 
 that. 
 
DAVID COX. 8 1 
 
 It was not until 1829 that he came back to 
 London, and was established at Kensington, 
 to push his fortunes with greater rapidity, if 
 that might be. He was now six-and-forty, 
 and the time is chosen by Mr. Solly — his volu- 
 minous and devoted biographer-r— as a dividing 
 point between two periods in his art ; between 
 the second and the third, where in all there are 
 four, according to the view of that careful 
 and sympathetic but not faultless student. 
 Later, there will be something to say about 
 this division : for the moment we may accept 
 it as indicating change of subject, if not quite 
 of manner. It was at this time that David 
 Cox began to travel abroad, and to note, not 
 indeed the characteristics of the lands he 
 crossed to — for these he never specially entered 
 into — but the charm of the sea. To this period, 
 when settlement in London made such brief 
 expeditions easy to him, belong his drawings 
 of far down the River, of the Thames mouth, 
 of Calais Sands. Spirited enough already — 
 fresh and breezy, but the colours Wanting in 
 variety and pleasantness ; the tone, how much 
 
82 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 less truthful to agreeable and vivid impression 
 than that of the kindred themes of Ulverston 
 and Lancaster a dozen years later ! 
 
 Confining himself still, in the main, to . 
 small and finished work, with increased range 
 of subject, as I say, and with increased vivacity 
 of treatment, as all of us who like his later 
 work still better may readily admit, Cox strug- 
 gled on : the admitted equal now, it may be, 
 of certain prominent comrades ; producing 
 much with diligence, and so at last — though 
 no considerable price is ever paid for the con- 
 stant labour — at last saving money. The years 
 bring many changes in his domestic life. His 
 son is a man, and has left him. The health 
 of his wife, now approaching old age, is more 
 and more uncertain. His interest in Society 
 is anything but keen. Social ambition, if he 
 ever had it at all, has quite ceased. He with- 
 draws himself, or seeks to withdraw himself, 
 more and more in his art ; and not so much 
 in the art that is accepted and bought at Ex- 
 hibitions as in that which presents to his 
 deepening intelligence problems he would like 
 
DAVID COX. 83 
 
 to solve. Urgent need for him to stay in 
 London no longer exists. He goes down in 
 1844 to the village of Harborne, outside his 
 native town, — busies himself for a while with 
 his bit of land and garden. 
 
 The country came to David Cox as a great 
 rest. And the rest brought a renewal. The 
 freedom from engagement, the absence of 
 visible rivalry — of competitive activity akin to 
 his own, pushing him on, whether he wished 
 it or not — were themselves advantages. He 
 began, I think, to possess himself ; and in the 
 new familiarity with the quiet and common 
 land, the flat field, the hedge-row, the uneventful 
 country road, the wide, open, and changeful 
 sky, he began to feel distinctly what it was that 
 he wanted to do, and began to feel that he could 
 do it. In country unromantic and nowise 
 remarkable, changing weather is the main 
 interest : wind and sunshine make such 
 country alive ; and Cox's representation of wind 
 and sunshine became now more imaginative and 
 dramatic. His wife's death, soon after their 
 removal — so soon as 1845 — left him for a 
 
 G 2 
 
84 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 While crushed and lonely; but he recovered 
 himself, and one feels sure that his whole 
 nature was enriched by his later experience. His 
 art, simple as heretofore, waxed passionate and 
 personal, and his genius came to him in his old age. 
 
 That period, of eighteen forty-four and five, 
 is the real period of his change. Not, I think, 
 with any other need we greatly concern our- 
 selves. That there had been growth and 
 wider range and alteration of style and subject 
 long before, I have allowed already, and these 
 things have interest for us if we stand before 
 a large collection of his work. But the main 
 thing to remember will continue to be the 
 point at which his more significant artistry 
 emerges from the accumlated mass of his skil- 
 ful achievement — the point at which undenia- 
 ble talent gives place to impressive genius. 
 
 Not long after his final departure from 
 London, Cox began to paint in oil. The 
 bolder effects at which he was was now aiming 
 were effects to which his new medium was 
 suited, and Cox in his oil pictures became 
 more visibly the brother of Constable and of 
 
DAVID COX. 85 
 
 the great Frenchmen who, following after Con- 
 stable, were painting, at that moment, neither 
 strict fact, nor accurate detail, but impressions. 
 The comparative readiness with which Cox 
 mastered his new practice in oils is certainly- 
 remarkable, but it is hardly to be supposed 
 that the tardiness with which he began it 
 should have' left no sign on his work. 
 
 Devoting himself with a now cheerful energy 
 to his new and self -set task, and recording at 
 the same time, in his older craft of water 
 colour, visions of windy moor and pasture, 
 more ■ penetrating and impressive than any of 
 his youth or of his middle age, David Cox 
 lived happily in his chosen home in the country. 
 As time went on he was surrounded by a group 
 of sympathetic persons — some of them Bir- 
 mingham men, proud of him as a native of their 
 town, and simple and hearty admirers of the 
 old man's genius. Amongst them and amongst 
 his humbler village neighbours, Cox lived 
 a life of old-fashioned kindliness and quaint 
 courtesies. His charities were impulsive and 
 not discriminating. He bestowed not seldom 
 
86 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 on some thriftless villager the best slice out of 
 his leg of mutton ; he gave people raisins and 
 sugar on St. Thomas's Day — had formed his 
 habits before it was the fashion to be cynically 
 weary of festivals — and sent gifts round by 
 his housekeeper on the birthday of the Queen. 
 As long as he was able he set off every summer 
 on a sketching tour with some familiar friend : 
 Mr. Stone Ellis, whose precious collection of his 
 later and finer work was sold three or four years 
 since at Christie's, being several times his com- 
 panion. To London, for the sake of his son, for 
 the sake of Mr. Ellis., and for that of some 
 friendly artists, he still occasionally journeyed. 
 But about 1856 ill-health and very failing sight 
 began to limit his movement. The hours 
 became few in which, with an art ever more 
 and more abstract and summary, he jotted 
 down the vivid memoranda of expression in 
 Nature — Nature sunny or turbulent. His 
 grand- daughters were accustomed to be about 
 him, to cheer him as his feebleness grew. 
 One day, the biographer tells us, he said good- 
 bye to his pictures. With a gesture that 
 
DAVID COX. 87 
 
 would have seemed theatrical and affected in 
 any artist who had lived less simply for his art a 
 and for the Nature it nobly interpreted, he 
 waved his hand and withdrew himself from his 
 parlour and his work. He felt that the 
 business he had lived for was over. He lay 
 helpless for a very little while — died on the 
 7th of June, 1859. 
 
 One of the greatest of English landscape 
 painters, Cox, painted Wales. It had been a 
 favourite country with some of his elder con- 
 temporaries. John Varley had been there 
 much. And he himself, born in the town of 
 Birmingham, turned naturally to Wales, which 
 is Birmingham's playground. But the draw- 
 ings in which he represented Wales the best — 
 drawings sometimes splendidly slight and 
 always of masterly vehemence — were done 
 only at a period of his life which allowed his 
 contemporaries to say already that the work of 
 his life was over. The local love of Cox's for 
 the nearest country to him that was free and 
 wild was conceived early, but it bore its 
 
88 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 best fruit chiefly at a remote and unexpected 
 ♦time. Very long years and a life of almost 
 monotonous struggle were in store for David 
 Cox, before the profounder feeling, bred in 
 part of experience and age and loss, came to 
 make his rendering of the landscape of "Wales 
 vivid, intense, and personal. 
 
 While true to the peculiar forms of Welsh 
 scenery, he was truer still to its effects. You 
 have but to go with a keen eye by the London 
 and North- Western Railway from Chester to 
 Holyhead, and you see not only in form but in 
 colour and light, a gallery of David Cox's. Flint 
 Castle, Turner's breezy subject in the Liber, the 
 ruined tower still set firm on the shore, the 
 shingle of the beach, the great distance, the 
 " wash of air." Rhyl, with its long sands, its sea 
 fresh and open, its wide outlook and breadth of 
 the sky. Then, behind it, the Vale of Clwyd, 
 the stream, the massed foliage, the bare and 
 precipitous hill rising suddenly out of very 
 green and very flat pastures— a subject essen- 
 tially Cox's, a contrast of form he loved. 
 Further on, as you get towards Bangor, a 
 
DAVID COX. 89 
 
 glimpse of Beaumaris, the windy headland, 
 with the sharp turn in the road that surrounds 
 it — the road with cliff above it and the stout 
 sea wall below. Then the quick current of the 
 Straits : little boats tossing : a breeze blowing 
 fresh. He has realized each scene vividly — 
 the view, and your feeling too, as you look at 
 the view. But it was in the solemn inland 
 country, in the remote seclusion of its moun- 
 tain valleys, that David Cox found landscape 
 and effect most completely accordant with the 
 feeling and interest of his later time. Many 
 artists, since Cox, have been to Bettwys, and 
 some had been there before him ; but the rest 
 have been content to find there what is com- 
 monly pretty and what is easily picturesque — 
 for the most part the mere traditional and ac- 
 cepted beauty of falling water, and sky re- 
 flected in clear and shallow streams, and 
 sunlight glinting through green leafage — the 
 art of our lightest and emptiest hours — the 
 water colour of the drawing-room. Cox found 
 other things — the truer characteristics of that 
 remote scenery and of its desolate life : the 
 
9 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 wild woods heavy with rain, the stone-walled 
 fields, the dogged tramp of the cloaked 
 peasant woman over the wet path, the blown 
 shepherd and huddled flock on the mountain 
 sheep-walk. Cox entered into the spirit of 
 that lonely landscape, simple and humble even 
 in its grandeur — by turns melancholy, admon- 
 ishing, passionate. For him alone the land- 
 scape of Wales, with its winds and showers, 
 its grey and shrouded mornings, its spaces 
 of quietness and tender light breaking out in 
 evening skies after a day of storm, was alive 
 and expressive. 
 
 He was at Bettwys first in 1 844, and thence- 
 forward once every year till 1856, when, three 
 years before his death, he needs must see it 
 for the last time. From the first it had 
 attracted him ; and in those simple elements of 
 the lower mountain scenery, which he got to 
 know so well, there was always, for him, some 
 effect, some combination, which, if not 
 actually new, was as good as new to his mind 
 at the moment, since he felt it vividly. He 
 reproduced without satiety, reproduced with 
 
DAVID COX. 91 
 
 variations, and with interest continually main- 
 tained ; nay, even strengthened by familiarity. 
 He had himself, in his old age, of the Welsh 
 poetic nature, the brooding and tender stedf ast- 
 ness. Going, in one of his summer tours — I 
 think it was with Mr. Ellis — to the famous 
 woods and Abbey of Bolton, he expressed 
 himself in writing, that it was all unquestionably 
 fine, but he could not find much new to in- 
 terest him. In Wales it never occurred to 
 him to ask for the new. There, the old was 
 enough for him. 
 
 And so the scenery and feeling of Wales, as 
 these are apprehended by the receptive and the 
 watching — and not by the tourist, the guide- 
 book's laborious yet cheerful slave, who hurries 
 from show-place to show-place — so the scenery 
 and feeling of Wales came to be recorded in a 
 hundred sketches. Sometimes he did not only 
 record an impression, but retained and inten- 
 sified it, and then there came from him the 
 triumph of his artistry and native and natural 
 sentiment — such a work of controlled pathos 
 and deepest gravity as The Welsh Funeral. 
 
92 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 The figures there are still but landscape 
 painter's figures : little attempt to individualise 
 them : none that they should greatly impress us 
 — it is out of the landscape alone, and the accord- 
 ing movement of the humble troop towards the 
 churchyard, that he has wrung the expression. 
 He painted the picture in 1850 : a day of pass- 
 ing storm ; light breaking on the top of 
 Bettwys Crags that he had painted so often in 
 so many moods of sunshine or shower. There is 
 a longspace of shadowlowon the hillside, where, 
 from amongst the thick and doleful woodland, 
 the little church lifts its grey stone belfry, and 
 its bell clangs for the dead; and along the 
 field-path, by the stone-walled field, the 
 funeral crowd, with bent heads — neighbourly 
 folk, gathered from cottage in the valley, and 
 farm away on the mountain — step slowly to 
 the churchyard. He had beheld the scene 
 himself, and felt it intensely. In the fore- 
 ground, children handle flowers— a detail that 
 he knew his work too well to insist upon. 
 Make what you like of it; but for him it had a 
 meaning he was not careful to urge ; only he 
 
DAVID COX. 93 
 
 told some one who was looking at the picture, 
 " Those are not chance flowers, but poppies. 
 They symbolize the sleep of death." All the 
 solemnity of the art of David Cox, the graver 
 and profound er chords of his music, came to 
 him in Wales. 
 
 But of course all the delightful and splendid 
 records of those later and greater years are not 
 confined to Wales. Almost in the first of those 
 years, he made an expedition to Haddon and 
 Eowsley. Tender little sketches of the village 
 of Rowsley, nestled under its low line of hills, 
 were cherished by Mr. Ellis, his companion, 
 to the last. The amateur who requires upon 
 each of his Coxes the special Cox label, would 
 hardly, I imagine, deem them characteristic or 
 desirable, for while they have greater variety 
 and greater harmony of colour than his earlier 
 work, they are without the slashing strength 
 of his later, and are valuable as exceptions^ 
 just because in them no big foreground grasses 
 are wet and meadows spongy, no sheep huddle 
 in storm, no ship bears up against the wind, 
 no stout woman on the bare common struggles 
 
94 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 in boisterous weather. They are yaluable just 
 because they show David Oox's sensitiveness to 
 an order of beauty he very rarely pourtrayed. 
 The sketches of Haddon — the Hall, the 
 terrace, the stately garden — are perhaps less 
 fascinating, but as a series they will continue 
 to be noteworthy as examples of slight, bold 
 and broad execution, of work done in the 
 fullest vigour of the artist, of draughtsman- 
 ship inexact indeed, but splendidly firm, and 
 indicative. And as to draughtsmanship, it is too 
 much forgotten that the standard exacted of 
 an artist in home studies tranquil and laborious 
 is not fairly to be- demanded in rapid out-door 
 work. To each work its conditions, and to 
 each its triumph. Certain of the drawings of 
 terrace steps and balustrade at Haddon show 
 that Cox was not blind to the quality of 
 massive line, pure, simple, and unbroken. 
 One says this : one does not say that his train- 
 ing would ever have allowed him to render 
 faultlessly the quality he perceived and in- 
 dicated. There is a masterly accuracy, and a 
 masterly inaccuracy— the last was David Cox's. 
 
DAVID GOX. 95 
 
 Cox reached his highest point, in out- 
 door work alone, in a sketch of Stokesay, 
 near Ludlow (1852).* Leaving for the nonce 
 the solemn tone of the best Bettwys sub- 
 jects, he here, in an hour's delightful task, 
 recorded the vivid and strong enjoyment 
 which all true lovers of nature take in wind 
 and turbulent sky and the open and common 
 country; and in all landscape art there is 
 no record of effect more decisive and vigorous 
 than this — more vehement, more energetic, or 
 more possessed with the very spirit of the 
 scene. Some other generation, if its colours 
 keep, will put it beside the Three Trees of Eem- 
 brandt — beside the Watercress Gatherers and 
 the Solway Moss of Liber Studiorum — and it 
 will not suffer by the comparison. A pathway 
 leads us through long grass in the foreground, 
 and two peasant women tramp on in the blus- 
 tering weather. A . lowering sky — yet much 
 of it bright and windy— its darkness splen- 
 didly concentrated to a point of storm. On 
 one side, the low-toned hills, green with the 
 
 * Sold at the Stone Ellis Sale, 1877— to Mr. Levy, I believe. 
 
96 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 sharpness of light still upon them, recede to 
 a narrow blue moor— the distance rich and 
 mysterious, and veiled : the near country in 
 the keen light after rain. The elements of 
 the landscape are after all very nearly the 
 accustomed ones : what is memorable is the 
 sudden and passionate truth. 
 
 Cox would have had small claim to lastf 
 ing greatness, if the truth of impression, 
 which his sketches seized so promptly, had 
 been wholly frittered away in the long 
 elaboration of the studio labour to which he 
 was almost . bound to betake himself during 
 the eight months of the English winter. It 
 was not frittered away, though indeed it 
 was undeniably weakened, as it is generally 
 the fate of the landscape painter for 
 his impressions to be; for he deals, and 
 especially in our newer art, as the 
 buyers of elaborate landscape little enough 
 remember, not with the beauties of per- 
 manent form, but with those of vanishing 
 effect. And how are they, or how is the 
 impression of them, to be arrested while he 
 
DAVID COX. 97 
 
 works ? Uherston Sands and Rhyl Sands— both 
 of them drawings of his later years — are 
 both, in their way, happy examples of the 
 art of Cox, when the comparative elaboration 
 of his second thoughts had come to modify, 
 in the studio, something of the fervour of 
 the first. The Uherston is the more poetical 
 in sentiment : the more harmonious and 
 beautiful in grouping and line. Throughout 
 most of the landscape the wide sands are 
 lifted into the wind, and there is little 
 besides : only at the left corner, where the 
 blast is strongest, a party of wind-blown 
 gipsies huddle together or make laborious 
 advance. In Rhyl the painter has grappled 
 with common-place figures, semi-fashionable 
 seaside costumes, and has saved the work 
 from its natural impression of common-place 
 by splendid power of large wave drawing, 
 and the old skill in effects of atmosphere, here 
 clear and fresh. 
 
 Cox worked much in sepia ; and in sepia, 
 too, for his proper satisfaction and benefit, 
 
 * Exhibited at the Old Masters, January 1875. 
 
 H 
 
98 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 and not only as lessons to pupils. Vivid 
 effects pourtrayed at the hour of their ob- 
 servation convince us of this, but we are 
 convinced also that for the full exercise of 
 his genius the range of the "water-colour 
 painter needed to be available — black and 
 white were not enough for him. Other men 
 have pourtrayed sunshine in black and white ; 
 but Rembrandt and Meryon, even more 
 keenly and delicately sensitive than Cox to 
 the last subtleties of the effects they sought 
 to reproduce, handled, not sepia and the 
 brush, but ink and the etching-needle. 
 Moisture and wind and wide spaces and 
 movement were within the range of David 
 Cox in black and white. He was perhaps 
 too absolute a colourist to dispense with 
 colour in sunshine. His rich harmonies are 
 harmonies in colour : it is in colour that 
 his tone is generally truest. So it is in 
 Mr. Holbrook Gaskell's sketch of Dort, Dort 
 from the Sea* — Van Goyen's favourite subject 
 — but Cox's means must not be restrained to 
 
 * Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, January 1878. 
 
DAVID COX. 
 
 99 
 
 the monochrome of the great old Dutch master : 
 he must have patches of red and blue on 
 sailors and flag— a delicious thin light of 
 showery sunshine over further sails and distant 
 church and windmills. So it is in a Bridge 
 in Warwickshire, — so keenly true in brilliant 
 colour — among the best of his not latest 
 drawings. And so again in Miss Coates's 
 sketch of the Welsh coast Near Afon Wen ■* 
 a chosen example of deep harmony of tone 
 and unity of effect— a sketch of hillock and 
 down, under grey and gathering skies — a land- 
 scape across which a broken path with its 
 group of lonely riders, wavers to right and 
 left among sandhills and long grasses blown — 
 no, torn through — by wind from the sea. 
 Cox, who had painted already the track of the 
 tourist, turned southward this time with the 
 coast below Carnarvon, and passed, where 
 Turner (as England and Wales will show) had 
 passed before him, to the lost world's end of 
 Afon Wen and Cricceith. And here is a sketch 
 of the late Welsh wanderings, and one of 
 
 * Stone Ellis Sale, 1877. 
 
 H 2. 
 
100 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ABT. 
 
 the finest fruits of that fruitful time, which 
 lifted Cox, as nothing had lifted him in all 
 the long years before, above the level of high 
 talent which many may reach, to the place 
 reserved in our English Art, for a very few, 
 of whom he became among the greatest. 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 
 
 1792— 1878. 
 
 Even the briefest writing of biography is 
 always difficult, and most difficult perhaps 
 when he of whom you write is but lately 
 with the dead. For even if his days have 
 been very long ones he will still have 
 left much of his life behind him; much 
 of his truest life, perhaps, in friends, in 
 kindred, in connections no biographer can 
 seize upon. Nothing is less truthful than 
 biography; or rather, nothing is more one- 
 sided. The admiring acquaintance with a 
 turn for book-making, the enthusiastic rela- 
 tive whose bereavement is solaced by the 
 subscriptions of the libraries — these are hardly 
 
104 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the persons to whom the world must go at 
 last for the veracious and balanced story. 
 Possibly it is never forthcoming, and we are 
 fain to be content with the acquaintance's view 
 of externals or the kinsman's partial view of 
 intimate life. To each will have been afforded 
 the means of telling us something ; by each 
 much will necessarily be withheld, and much 
 unknown. 
 
 They are dealing, say, with the life of an 
 artist, whether painter, sculptor, actor, or 
 man of literature ; and we are told the dates 
 of his progress in his career, and much of his 
 accomplished work; not much of work he 
 had planned but never executed ; work, never- 
 theless, on which perhaps he had set great 
 store, and had looked forward to completing, 
 and "purposes unsure" 
 
 " That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
 amount." 
 
 We are told, too, of his children — their names, 
 their ages, and their outward ways — yet, 
 necessarily, not which were his favourites, if 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 105 
 
 favourites he had ; which he helped, and which 
 he embittered ; which disappointed him, and 
 which enabled him, through strong fresh in- 
 terest in the life and success of another, to 
 renew his own youth. And we are told of the 
 woman he married, whose influence may have 
 been dominant in his career. But the woman 
 he did not marry — had she no place in his life 
 because the biographers are silent about her ? 
 Or did she for years take him this way and 
 that, by roads that no one ignorant of her 
 could understand his following ? Or was it 
 a thing of short days and decisive ending — 
 three meetings, perhaps, and a separation — 
 so that afterwards her place in his life was 
 only in some work she had inspired, or only 
 in memories, keen once, then dimmer, then 
 gradually effaced ? Sorry matters, or matters 
 of which a man may be proud — secrets either 
 way, and the biographer has passed them by. 
 
 Oruikshank was writing his autobiography 
 almost at the time of his death, and in some 
 form, more or less complete, it is presently to 
 
io6 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 appear, the manuscript having been duly 
 lodged with his friend, Mr. Bell, the publisher. 
 Meantime a few facts and a few impressions, 
 gathered from those who knew him well in his 
 last years, will suffice before we proceed to some 
 rough estimate of his long work — work that 
 extended over nearly three quarters of a cen- 
 tury, and, beginning before the ten years of 
 the Regency, ended with almost the latest 
 movements of fashionable teetotalism. Many 
 who did not know him at home have at'-' 
 least met him about ; for not only was he a 
 familiar figure of the dreary quarter which he 
 inhabited-*-where the dingy squalor of St. 
 Pancras touches on the shabby respectability 
 of Camden Town — but he travelled much in 
 London, and may well have been beheld hand- 
 ing his card to a stranger with whom he had 
 talked casually in a Metropolitan Railway 
 carriage,, or announcing his personality to a 
 privileged few who were invited to see in him 
 the convincing proof of the advantages of feeding 
 genius with water from the New River Company. 
 He was an entirely honest man ; and who is there 
 
GEORGE GRUIKSHANK. 107 
 
 who would not forgive the little pleasurable 
 vanities that he chose to allow himself- at the 
 fag end of a life not over-prosperous — a 
 career no one had carefully made smooth, a 
 career filled full of inventive work as rich as 
 Hogarth's and as genial as Dickens's ? 
 
 He came of a family devoted to humble art, 
 and was born on the 27th of September, 1792; 
 his father, Isaac Cruikshank, being a little 
 known as a painter in water-colours and etcher 
 of social sketches, and his brother Eobert 
 soon, while still a lad, to be entrusted with 
 the work of book-illustration. As George, 
 then, grew to a youth, he found himself sur- 
 rounded by the most modest practitioners of 
 whatever art seemed likeliest to bring a liveli- 
 hood to the not very gifted. The family was 
 far from the high places of art and from the 
 society of the makers of beautiful things. 
 George handled the etching needle and drew on 
 the wood block, there being apparently little 
 question of his pursuing any other craft. His 
 earliest signed work is a print representing 
 a horse-race. He must have been fourteen 
 
108 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 or even less when he did it. His earliest 
 signed caricature is of the year 1807 
 — he was but fifteen then— and it repre- 
 sents Cobbett going to St. James's. Much of 
 his early work was shared with his brother 
 Eobert. Robert was considered by the family 
 to be the more gifted fellow of the two. His 
 things had value, though the value was small, 
 when George's were unheeded ; and it has 
 been said sometimes that George was wont at 
 that period to work under Robert's name. 
 But in his later life, when memory of the 
 earliest events was still keen and accurate, 
 George Cruikshank said to one at least who 
 spoke to him on the matter that this was not 
 so. Robert, however much his fame must 
 needs be eclipsed by that of his brother, is to 
 have full credit for all that appears with his 
 signature. 
 
 The systematic education that the artist 
 needs was lacking to Cruikshank ; he had no 
 schooling that would make him a finished 
 draughtsman, and one of the most genial of 
 his appreciators has written perhaps more 
 
GEORGE GRUIKSHANK. 109 
 
 than on accurate examination He would be 
 able to justify when he< has written that 
 George and Robert were "eminently skilled 
 in the technicalities of etching."* The truth 
 is, technicalities were the things in which 
 Cruikshank was the least skilled, up to the 
 very end. But there was one immense factor 
 in the training of an artist which Cruikshank 
 was too wise to lack. He had the sense — 
 wanting, alas ! to too many of the self- 
 satisfied craftsmen of our day — to observe 
 keenly when great work was before him ; and 
 he learned from the great men (and from no 
 one greater, and no one more, than from 
 Hogarth) not indeed, the correctness which 
 only the schools could have taught him, but 
 thoroughness and concentration. Cruikshank 
 was never too fine or too exalted for the 
 humblest work that was set him. The 
 labour of the mind enriched the commonest 
 theme. 
 
 The century was still very young when 
 
 * The Daily Telegraph, February 2, 1878 — an admirable article, 
 probably by Mr. Sala. 
 
no STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 Cruikshank began the series of Lottery prints 
 he was destined to do ; then sheets of Twelfth 
 Night Characters — aids to a game, or custom, 
 of two generations ago — and children's books, 
 published at a penny apiece, and caricatures, 
 and comic valentines — these last among the 
 rarest of his works now. Many were the 
 publishers that employed him in those and the 
 next early years — there was James "Wallis, the 
 issuer of children's penny books ; Knight ; 
 Ohappell, the publisher of London Cries ; Hone, 
 Baldwyn, Robins, Tilt and Bogue, Tegg, and 
 so on, as fame grew and years increased, to 
 Bentley and Chapman and Hall. At first, of 
 course, the designs were not well paid for. 
 Shillings even, and not pounds, were cheer- 
 fully accepted for caricatures that Hone pub- 
 lished and spread over the town. And as 
 popularity grew, and the man had made his 
 mark, and Cruikshank's work got to be every- 
 where, he had not the wisdom of restraint 
 and reserve. One doubts much whether at 
 any time of his life he had much accumula- 
 tion of money. Anything, indeed, but a 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. in 
 
 luxurious man, his -ways -were yet not com- 
 patible with thought for the morrow. He was 
 twice married : the second time to the daughter 
 of Baldwyn, who had published much of his 
 early work. There were many drains upon 
 his purse. His hand was very free and open ; 
 and being neither a bourgeois, who must save 
 for saving's sake, nor an artist in society, 
 who must save for the position of his children, 
 he accepted, on the whole not very despairingly, 
 a poverty he did not feel to be dishonourable. 
 Even when he borrowed money, his borrow- 
 ing did not " dull the edge of husbandry." 
 He was to the last a worker, proud of his 
 work — Greorge Cruikshank, no small person- 
 ality, no light to be hidden under a bushel ; 
 proud of his fame of the moment ; contented 
 in the knowledge that it would hardly 
 decrease. 
 
 A sedentary workman for some sixty years, 
 all his recreations were athletic. The art 
 of acting, which he enjoyed to attempt, 
 calls out much healthy play of physical 
 powers. And then he was a volunteer — a 
 
112 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ABT. 
 
 volunteer early in the century, when England 
 was frightened by the thoughts of a camp at 
 Boulogne ; a volunteer fifty years later, when 
 Napoleon the Third found it hard to restrain 
 the tongues of his colonels. 
 
 We have most of us heard some tales of his 
 vigour — this and that man's reminiscences of 
 his physical endurance in his old age — of his 
 walk home to the Hampstead Road from 
 farthest Fulham; of his insisting on dancing 
 a hornpipe in the grave offices of Mr. Bentley. 
 Very late in his life he used to pay visits 
 among the poor. Mr. Edward Barrett, of 
 Brighton, one of the friendliest of his ad- 
 mirers, has called upon Cruikshank just as the 
 old man has returned from the heart of St. 
 Giles's with some story of misery and 
 drunkenness which, in relating, he has had to 
 weep over. 
 
 There are many portraits of Cruikshank; 
 some of them, and not the least accurate, 
 being those that have been issued in a cheap 
 form and sold some twenty years since, by 
 the thousand. He figured in the Gallery of 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 113 
 
 Maolise, when Maclise, permitting himself 
 some respite from work that claimed to be 
 historical and was uninspired and dry, con- 
 tributed to Fraser, in its great days, work that 
 has proved to be historical, though it never 
 meant to be. Cruikshank figures in the out- 
 line portraits (Fraser, 1833) which a recent 
 re-issue has spread more widely, and which, 
 were it for the great and bitter design of 
 Talleyrand alone, would deserve to live very 
 long. But Cruikshank never liked the acces- 
 sories of his portrait by Maclise, and for him 
 the likeness became a . bad one because it re- 
 presented him among one at least of the evils 
 he satirised. The "pleasant vice" of much 
 drinking was not that of his choice ; no back- 
 ground and accessories could have disgusted 
 him more than those of the tap-room and the 
 beer-barrel, the pot and the pipe. But Cruik- 
 shank was accustomed to draw himself, in at 
 least the secondary characters of his pictorial 
 dramas. His likeness may be traced, one 
 thinks, in many of his prints — in essays on 
 the copper-plate, in dainty drawings on the 
 
ii4 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 block — and some among his friends retain the 
 tradition that the Fagin of his Oliver Twist is 
 but an exaggerated Oruikshank. 
 
 As Time went on apace, neither the passage 
 of Time itself, nor the hard work which 
 crowded the days of his maturity in art, nor 
 the comparative neglect of the later years, 
 when Oruikshank, no longer quite in the 
 movement of the day, was solaced by visits in 
 the Hampstead Road, chiefly of a very few 
 who were collectors of his work, or of some 
 stray humourist still faithful and confident in 
 the achievements of so many years ago — as 
 Time went on, Oruikshank wore well and 
 slowly, so that it was truly said of him that 
 he looked as if he had once been very old 
 and then had forgotten it. Employed no 
 longer in sketching and satirising the society 
 of which he was hardly any more a part, he 
 betook himself, and a good deal by choice, to 
 work more distinctly ambitious than any he 
 had attempted when his hand was really the 
 strongest and his brain the most fertile. He 
 furnished the design for a monument to King 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 115 
 
 Robert the Bruce. He painted in oils, not 
 only this or that moral lesson, but a tale of 
 heroism in humble life. No doubt the absence 
 of the knowledge of academical draughtsman- 
 ship told againnt him not less in 1871 than 
 it would have done half a century before, and 
 no doubt the absence of any capacity for the 
 subtle modulations of colour — nay, the absence 
 even of sensitiveness to these — made his 
 painting in oil a failure when judged by the 
 side even of quite every- day work by every- 
 day artists. Thus it was that no fresh 
 honours came to him when he was still eager 
 for them. The popularity of the great days 
 was a little forgotten by the public, in the 
 presence of the failure of the most recent. 
 And then again, advertised poverty — such as 
 George Cruikshank's was, from time to time — 
 is never a helpful thing. We worship merit a 
 little, but success more, and success must have 
 its stamp. The public of Cruikshank narrowed. 
 Of [course critics and journalists — the men 
 whose business it is to keep in memory the 
 work that the chance public praises one day 
 
 1 2 
 
1 1 6 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 and forgets the next — knew that Oruikshank 
 was great, and how he had been great, and 
 having in more than one notable instance said 
 so faithfully during his old age, said so again 
 when he died. And of course, again, so 
 much of his work having become rare, 
 collectors of it had arisen — curious and anxious 
 seekers, to whose interest we shall owe the 
 preservation of many of his early and many 
 even of his riper things. For them, when 
 Oruikshank's work was pretty well accom- 
 plished and " finis" seemed about to be 
 written to that immense volume of produc- 
 tion, Mr. G. W. Reid engaged on a task of 
 care — the great catalogue raisonne in which, with 
 here and there errors not easily avoided, he 
 has chronicled well-nigh five thousand designs : 
 "the smiling offspring," as Thackeray so 
 admirably said of them — " the smiling off- 
 spring of painful labour." But in the main 
 Cruikshank was forgotten, and the weakly 
 smiles — faint though now and again they needs 
 must be, and of indulgence rather than com- 
 mendation — which are given by the English 
 
GEORGE CRV1KSHANK. 117 
 
 public to the efforts of some at least of our 
 youngest English humour, a little trivial and 
 slight, had ceased to be bestowed on that larger 
 and more massive humourist who lingered from 
 the Past he was a part of. 
 
 The artistic qualities of Cruikshank have 
 not lately been enough admitted. One or 
 two good critics — critics otherwise well in- 
 structed indeed — have through pure ignorance 
 of his multitudinous work, assumed that his 
 genius lay wholly within the limits of the 
 grotesque. Even the men who have admired 
 him the most, and have lately with all the feel- 
 ing of somewhat recent loss been urging upon 
 us the treasures of his invention and humour — 
 even these have generally been content to let 
 it go for granted that the artistic qualities in 
 Cruikshank's work were small. But that is 
 perhaps because many of them themselves, 
 more occupied with the humour than with the 
 art of his creations, assign too narrow limits 
 to what they consider art, and recognise art 
 less promptly and surely than they recognise 
 
1 18 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 humour. Truly, indeed, the qualities of 
 Cruikshank's works are not those we are all 
 accustomed to look for in art that is decorative 
 or imitative, and it does us good to look at 
 Cruikshank's works just because their quali- 
 ties are not those. His oil paintings, such as 
 they are, have no charm of colour : his work 
 in black and white — which is that, of coursOj 
 by which he must be remembered — has no 
 suavity of faultless line and no balanced order 
 of intricate composition. Worse even than 
 that, certain objects that he was representing 
 pretty often were never mastered by him with 
 any certainty. A fairly-made rocking-horse 
 approaches to Nature and the Greek more 
 nearly than does many a horse of Cruikshank's. 
 The beauty of a tree, except when he drew it 
 very small in a most distant background, was 
 habitually lost upon him. Neither the virtues 
 of a draughtsman trained in academies nor 
 those of a painter who has lived with the 
 country in its intimate life are perceptible in 
 Cruikshank. But he observed men, and the 
 characters of men ; and what he observed and 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 119 
 
 cared about in these he recorded with memory 
 so accurate and fingers so nimble and adroit, 
 that one overlooks, and has a right to over- 
 look, the lack of the trained draughtsmanship. 
 He did nothing mechanically. There are so 
 many thoughts in each of his "works, and all 
 the thoughts are clearly expressed. That is 
 the virtue of an artist. His groups are as 
 full of movement as is a fete of David Teniers. 
 There is action or rest in each of his figures 
 — never stolidity or indifference. The work 
 is alive : it can speak and can suggest. These 
 are virtues of an artist, if an artist is not to 
 mean henceforth only a decorator — only the 
 realiser for us of exquisite existing form. The 
 last slang of the aesthetic studio calls a picture 
 an "invention" — "inventions" crowd upon 
 us from Chelsea and Fulham. Are we to 
 allow the word to the latest juxtaposition of 
 agreeable tints, and deny it to the lively and 
 expressive grouping of men and women who 
 have lived ? To speak with accuracy, " in- 
 ventions" do not exist in art — we have to do 
 with combinations only — a re-shuffling of the 
 
120 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 perpetual cards. The combinations of Cruik- 
 shank, which, we count by the thousand, are 
 keen and varied and veracious ; they are full, 
 then, of qualities that are artistic, though he 
 was not preoccupied with considerations of 
 art, and though visions of high beauty were 
 very much denied to him. 
 
 Cruikshank's work: — after the earliest of his 
 youth — may for all practical purposes be 
 divided into two classes; the first, political 
 and social caricatures; the second, illustra- 
 tions of books. We have seen him already, 
 in the earliest of his youth, doing the mass 
 of insignificant labour which, if cherished at 
 all by the collector of to-day, is cherished, one 
 supposes, for rarity alone. It is not this in- 
 deed, but the two great classes, that really 
 deserve attention, and of the two great classes 
 the one which is in truth the more noteworthy 
 is the second, the illustrations of books. 
 But as a caricaturist Cruikshank will be 
 always great. His touch was far more ex- 
 pressive than Rowlandson's : his subjects 
 generally, or his conception of them, far 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. , izi 
 
 less coarse than Gillray's. He seemed from 
 the first to step up out of the brutality 
 of that earlier age. But he felt him- 
 self inferior to Gillray, and candidly 
 avowed it. " Gillray," he said in his later 
 years, " was a man, sir, to whom I was not 
 worthy to hold a candle !" The modesty was 
 excessive ; indeed, in some respects ill-placed. 
 But he felt doubtless before some specimens of 
 Gillray's design — the design, we must needs 
 remember, of one who had practically been his 
 leader in those early days — that if Gillray could 
 be coarser, he could also be more graceful. 
 About the female figure, about the nude, of 
 Gillray, there can be sometimes an harmonious 
 flow of line which is beyond Cruikshank. 
 
 But then, again, in the caricatures, as well 
 as afterwards in the book illustrations, Cruik- 
 shank realised his characters as no other 
 humourist had done — except Hogarth. He 
 did the Union Club for Humphrey. "What a 
 clever audacity there is in the representation 
 of "Wilberforce and Macaulay; and what a 
 wealth of invention ! As he worked, how 
 
122 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 thoughts and fancies crowded on him ! No 
 one, not even Hogarth himself, was more 
 pregnant. 
 
 He took the very English side of things — 
 satire on Napoleon, of course, in his pros- 
 perity ; satire, too, upon him in his adversity. 
 He took the humane side of things. Like the 
 greater part of England, he was of the party 
 of Queen Caroline. His weapon cuts at 
 George and at the vices of George. And when 
 once or twice he changed his standpoint, it 
 was with half a heart. His expression of the 
 new view wanted the force of conviction. The 
 caricaturist of that day, if he need not have 
 all the coarseness of Gillray, could not aspire 
 to the refinement of Leech or Tenniel, of 
 Keene or Du Maurier. The age would 
 not have understood it, and the humour 
 of Cruikshank was wont to be broad. Broad 
 humour, as the expression is often used, 
 is apt sometimes to be "broad" without 
 being "humour." There are amateurs with 
 whom the presence of the first suffices for the 
 two. Not so for the artist Cruikshank, for you 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 123 
 
 may see the humour as well as the " breadth" 
 in piece , after piece. Take the big print, for 
 . instance, the big coloured print of the King 
 of Timbuctoo offering one of his three daugh- 
 ters to " Captain " in marriage. See the 
 
 proud satisfaction of the King in the pos- 
 session of offspring so creditable — see the 
 darky beauties, damsels by no means sylph- 
 like in contour, their modest pride, their 
 happy grins and reasonable contentment with 
 their own charms — and see the dismay and 
 bewilderment of Captain , as he is em- 
 barrassed rather by the disagreeableuess than 
 the riches of the choice.' Cruikshank was 
 coarse at need. It is related to me that late 
 in life, when a plate was brought to him that 
 did him no credit, and it was suggested to 
 him that he could not have done it, because 
 it was thoroughly Vulgar, the honest man 
 looked at it a little carefully, and then 
 replied, "Ah! but I am sorry to say I did." 
 And indeed there has been a rumour that in 
 his youth and poverty he illustrated at least 
 one volume which he had better have left 
 
124 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 alone. But at all events this may be said for 
 him, towards the appeasing of those who 
 would limit somewhat too closely the field that 
 is open to the observer and the artist, that he 
 never in his caricatures accepted the theory of 
 the lower Parisian humourist, that humour 
 is found most easily in the relations of the 
 cocotte with her employer. Nor had he ever a 
 touch of that essential nastiness, that greasy 
 revoltingness, which the cheerful Teuton of 
 Berlin is fain to accept as humour. He was 
 simply a blunt Englishman, tolerant of life, 
 plain in comment, little disposed to mince 
 matters for boudoir or nursery. 
 
 But almost before he reached middle age 
 Cruikshank had abandoned caricature. He 
 became an illustrator of books, forgotten 
 things to begin with; then things of the 
 second rank; then, at length, the master- 
 pieces of literature, or books at least that 
 answered most successfully to the taste of the 
 day. Of these, the first— at least the first of 
 which the illustrations were of any note — 
 appears to have been Grimm's German Popular 
 
GEOBGE CRUIKSHANK. 125 
 
 Stories. But lie had begun more humbly. I 
 find that as early as 1 8 1 1 he copied — and it 
 may have been as the frontispiece to a pam- 
 phlet — the last plate but one of the Harlot's 
 Progress, the great series in which the graver 
 of Hogarth has itself given expression to the 
 genius of that profound and serious satirist — 
 an expression rough indeed, and memorandum- 
 like in comparison with the exquisite technical 
 skill with which the more accomplished en- 
 gravers whom Hogarth afterwards employed 
 have recorded for us every quality of 
 the Marriage a la Mode. Now Cruikshank's 
 copy of that humble but strong engraving of 
 Hogarth's — the last plate but one in the Harlot's 
 Progress — is worthy of notice, for though it 
 is yet humbler than the work of the master, 
 it has thought of Cruikshank's own in it. 
 The subject, it will be remembered, is the 
 death of the heroine — the fifth plate of the 
 series, the sixth being devoted, with a bitter 
 genius that was Hogarth's only, to the record 
 of the comrade's and bystanders' diligent pur- 
 suing of all evil, while the victim of evil lies 
 
126 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 in her very coffin before them. But the fifth 
 
 plate is the death itself — 
 
 " Extinguished is her bloom and native fire : 
 View the poor wretch in patient pains expire." 
 
 Now as the subject passes from the hands of 
 of the master Hogarth into those of the young 
 man Cruikshank, the expression is intensified, 
 is exaggerated, and needs must be coarsened. 
 But there are differences in the faces of two 
 women, and these are worth observing. 
 Cruikshank has looked upon the business with 
 a more humane eye. To the woman who is 
 already rifling the box of the dying he has 
 given a visage more repulsive than that which 
 we find in the original Hogarth. But to 
 the woman who is supporting the now droop- 
 ing and enfeebled figure of the victim he has 
 given a countenance shorn of the revolting 
 suggestions Hogarth was careful to convey, 
 and he has given her an expression of tender- 
 ness and solicitude, such as in dire straits can 
 "help the poor to die;" can help in some 
 little way, as Pompilia was helped in the 
 hospital by those — 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 127 
 
 " Small separate sympathies, combined and large, 
 Nothings that were, grown something very much." 
 
 Nor will this added touch of tenderness in 
 our artist surprise those who have noted the 
 quite exquisite pathos of a very late work — 
 the Death of Falstaff (18 58) — in which the face 
 of one who has died indeed " a-babbling of 
 green fields " lies very calm, with the sign of 
 gentle fancies but lately flown. 
 
 Humble at this early time, though to some 
 extent individual, are the book illustrations of 
 Cruikshank. There is a little book of the 
 trial of Thomas Bedworth, for the wilful 
 murder of Elizabeth Beasmore, and it has an 
 etching, with the attractive title, Horrid Murder 
 of Elizabeth Beasmore, and on a copy I have 
 seen Cruikshank has written, Drawn and etched 
 in two hours by George Cruikshank. It sounds 
 like hack-work,' does it not ? But the force 
 of it suggests that it was probably spon- 
 taneous. If not, then at least the vivid force 
 of Cruikshank's imagination enabled him to do 
 much, and to do it without delay. Whether 
 
128 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART 
 
 the collector deems the picture precious or 
 valueless, as far as rarity is concerned, mat- 
 ters little. It is precious as the extraordinary 
 realistic and dramatic rendering of the brutal 
 business of which the details just then, since 
 it was thought necessary to publish them, 
 must have attracted the curiosity of London. 
 And they attracted Cruikshank, for with what 
 a will has he entered into the rough pourtrayal 
 of the horrible scene ! The murderer, on the 
 last steps of some kitchen staircase, holds up 
 the heavy and drooping body by hand and 
 arm placed under the shoulders at the back, 
 and Thomas Bedworth — 'famous criminal of 
 the time — is raising the bleeding knife that 
 has fallen already on the bare and broad white 
 throat of Elizabeth Beasmore — famous victim 
 of the time. 
 
 And once again — it is in 1817 — there is 
 strong work, even beautiful work, given to a 
 subject fit only for the perusal of the last pur- 
 lieus of Seven Dials — Writ of Appeal of William 
 Ashford, Brother of the Deceased, for the Wilful 
 Murder of Mary Ashford ; and the history goes on 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 129 
 
 to relate how she was a beautiful young virgin, 
 and Cruikshank has furnished the book with 
 a lovely little wooded landscape, a country 
 road, its overhanging trees, its pleasant sur- 
 rounding meadows — a delicate and charming 
 study of the scene of the outrage. 
 
 So well did he do these things that at last 
 the novelists, whose own murders and out- 
 rages were all too romantic for that humble 
 world of fact to which thus far Cruikshank 
 had been devoted, saw the merits of the de- 
 signer. Mr. Pierce Bgan, who has given us 
 the classic pages of Life in London, found that 
 there was usefulness in Cruikshank. Then 
 there were last-century novelists to be illus- 
 trated : there was all Smollett ; there was 
 Fielding's Joseph Andrews. Afterwards there 
 was Harrison Ainsworth, and the great laugh- 
 ing genius of the master of our English fiction. 
 But before these there was Grimm's Stories, and 
 to the years 1 8 1 9 and 1 8 20 belongs a work 
 dear alike for its rarity and happy innocence 
 to the collector of Cruikshank — The Humourist, 
 a work in four volumes, published by Robins. 
 
130 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 The first edition of Grimm's German Popular 
 Stories dates from 1823, the time, as has been 
 hinted before, at which, roughly speaking, 
 Cruikshank may be said to have passed from 
 the realm of caricature, such as Gillray had 
 reigned over, to the realm of more serious art. 
 Baldwyn published the first series of the 
 Grimm, and the same, I gather, was re-issued 
 two years afterwards, in 1825, by Eobins, 
 who one year after that produced the second 
 series, after which the two volumes appear to 
 have been printed together by Eobins up to 
 the year 1 834. I am assured by the present 
 possessor of the original plates, Mr. Edwin 
 Truman of Old Burlington Street, that after 
 1 834 no use of the original plates was made, 
 Cundall's edition of 1846 containing illustra- 
 tions from wood-blocks, after the original 
 coppers — illustrations necessarily poor in com- 
 parison — and Mr. Bohn, it is assumed, must 
 have procured for his issue these blocks that 
 had been used in the edition of Cundall. The 
 stories were translated from the German by 
 one Edgar Taylor. Their immense popu- 
 
GEORGE CRV1KSHANK. 131 
 
 larity, especially with children upon whom 
 the finer simple poetry of the great Hans 
 Andersen must needs, it seems, be lost, 
 would keep the illustrations objects of value 
 and interest, even if such humourous dain- 
 ties as that of "The Elves and the Shoe- 
 maker did not justify the Cruikshauk 
 collector in seeing in them some of the most 
 attractive things the master has laid before 
 him. 
 
 The Vicar of Wakefield, the illustrations to 
 Joseph Andrews, the illustrations to Smollett, 
 came, all of them, near to the year 1 830 : 
 half way, say roughly, between the time of 
 Grimm and that of the great modern novels. 
 In 1836 came Sketches by Boz, and it is the 
 work of that year and of the next half-dozen 
 years that contains most of the substantial 
 masterpieces of the art of Cruikshank. Of 
 these masterpieces some are original etchings 
 on the copper-plate, others steel plates; and 
 besides these, there are the woodcuts, of 
 which altogether Mr. Reid in his catalogue 
 enumerates over seventeen hundred. In con- 
 ic 2 
 
132 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 sidering a little what was Cruikshank's place 
 as a pure etcher, we shall find that as to time, 
 he was not fortunately circumstanced, for the 
 art of etching has had two prosperous periods : 
 the first, the middle of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and the second, these last thirty 
 years. Between these periods — between 
 the time when Rembrandt, more than two 
 hundred years ago, expressed completely his 
 conceptions in etching, arid the time when 
 Meryon, nearly thirty years since, found the 
 same art as precisely fitted to the thing he 
 wanted to say — between these times the art 
 languished ; there was much work, but there 
 were few masters. Popular men in their 
 day practised the craft with what was deemed 
 to be success ; and in Cruikshank's own time, 
 David Roberts in England, and "Wilkie and 
 Geddes in Scotland, had been praised for their 
 work. The work of David Roberts is now 
 well-nigh forgotten ; a few fine things are 
 cherished from the hands of Wilkie and 
 Geddes, but it is seen that much of "Wilkie's 
 etching wanted the great qualities, and that 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 133 
 
 the landscape of Greddes is often too absolute 
 a reminiscence of the manner of Rembrandt. 
 The one master etcher who was strictly Cruik- 
 shank's contemporary had taken up etching 
 in the year 1 807, and had laid it aside in the year 
 1 8 1 9. That was Turner, whose experience of 
 it was but slight, but who touched no art that 
 he did not soon understand, and no art the list 
 of whose achievements he did not sensibly en- 
 large. Painter in oils, painter in water-colours, 
 etcher, engraver in mezzo-tint, one goes back 
 to him, after all, from every lesser man of his 
 time : the great dominating influence in art 
 of our nineteenth century. There was one 
 thing in pure etching that Oruikshank could 
 have learnt from Turner; he could have 
 learnt something from the excellent economy 
 of work in the etched leading lines of Liber 
 Studiorum. His own touch was too broken, 
 sometimes too often repeated : flow of line is 
 apt to be wanting to his design. He does not 
 lay a line and leave it, but returns to it some- 
 times and fidgets it. In the various distances 
 in Cruikshank's plates, subtlety of gradation is 
 
i 3 4 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 rarely attained. An incomplete technical 
 skill, or an incomplete carefulness in technical 
 matters, has left the break too sudden; the 
 picture has but two planes, a foreground and 
 a distance. But these things are apt to vary, 
 and we may find, scattered over the mass of 
 his work, examples of etching technically 
 successful, when considered quite apart from 
 the always present wit of the conception and 
 the always present sprightliness of the design. 
 But what one cares for, even more than 
 for technical excellence, are the signs of wide 
 and deep understanding; and the middle life 
 of Cruikshank was rich in the comprehension 
 of the fortunes of men. It is the lamentable 
 fate and folly of many practitioners of design, 
 who call themselves artists, to shut themselves 
 up in their studios with a little tapestry, a little 
 faded velvet, a lay figure, and occasionally a 
 picturesque model hired at so much an hour, 
 and then, when the criticism of the art so pro- 
 duced offends their pride — which is generally 
 termed their " sensitiveness" — to console them- 
 selves with the good opinion of their comrades 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 135 
 
 who live next door, and who, with much the 
 same amount of talent, share the narrowness 
 of their range and the vanity of their ignorance 
 of all our greater and by-past Art. But 
 Cruikshank understood that there had been 
 great Art before him, and that its materials 
 had been found in the study of life ; and 
 so Cruikshank — learning at least this lesson 
 from the elder masters — studied, not only 
 posed models, but actual life with patient care. 
 Why, his early success as a caricaturist had 
 been founded upon that. He had gone to 
 Nature as well as to Hogarth and Gillray. 
 And now, when there lay before him the 
 more serious task of illustrating the concep- 
 tions of the serious novelists — of trying to pub 
 into that humbler art of his, something not 
 only of the keenest observation, but also of 
 the intensity of imagination which is a neces- 
 sary condition of the great art of creative 
 literature — now, when the business before 
 him was to get himself into sympathy 
 with the genius of Dickens — he went to 
 Nature and looked at Nature keenly, guided 
 
136 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 by the widening experience of his own 
 life. And from that there resulted first the 
 realisation of scores of various characters 
 in the Sketches by Boz, and then the reali- 
 sation of the stress and excitement of the 
 critical moments of tragical adventure, of which 
 one of the finest instances is to be seen in 
 Oliver Twist, and another in Jack Sheppard, and 
 another in Miss Eske carried away during her 
 Trance — an illustration, done as late as 1849, 
 to the Clement Lorimer of Angus Reach. These 
 are the things that show George Oruikshank 
 to have had, like the one great genius with 
 whom he worked, the imagination of tragedy. 
 
 Take what is almost the final illustration to 
 the Oliver Twist — The Last Chance — Sykes on 
 the house-roof. With an imaginative power, 
 which is about as much lacking to the merely 
 popular illustrator as there is lacking to him 
 even the modest habit of closely studying the 
 work of the author he is employed to illustrate, . 
 Greorge Oruikshank has realised and conveyed 
 every common and repulsive feature of that 
 easily repulsive scene, in such a way that the 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANE. 137 
 
 stress of movement and beauty of tone and line 
 save it from pure brutality, and give to the 
 representation of it an artistic dignity as far from 
 the craft of the maker of the melodrama as from 
 that of the caricaturist. An ugly corner of one 
 forgets what obscure quarter, the squalid house, 
 the chimney with rope tied round it by the 
 escaping and hunted man now staggering on 
 the broken-tiled roof, the evil and worn face, 
 the energy of action — that is the main subject. 
 But what a fitting accompaniment in the sur- 
 roundings — the bull-dog, the criminal's con- 
 stant companion, crouched on the roof-top 
 with dull stare; the half-shrouded houses 
 across the narrow street, with the clothes-line 
 hung from the window, and from other win- 
 dows the sudden heads of eager on-lookers, 
 brandishing defiance and warning, and beyond 
 these what further mystery of the dark town 
 whose shabbiest of habitations lie crowded and 
 begrimed under the low wild sky ! 
 
 And Miss Eske ? It is a night when all the 
 elements are restless and disturbed. The wind 
 on the Thames has lashed the water of rising 
 
138 STUIDES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 tide into irregular waves, beaten from wharf 
 to wharf and pier to pier of the bridges. A 
 boat in the foreground, half submerged, is 
 struck against the lowest stonework of the 
 near bridge — the unconscious figure, darkly 
 veiled, lies crouched in the stern, and evil 
 men see imminent danger in the accident of 
 the moment. On the grey black river flow- 
 ing behind no other craft is near them : distant 
 masts are discerned, of coal barges, it may be, 
 lying up safely with their gentle to-and-fro 
 tossing, under the tall protecting wall of 
 black warehouse, with high chimney and 
 crane and other river-side gear along the 
 wharf; and behind this dark safety, of the 
 solid land at least, however forbidding and 
 ugly, the distant sky is shot with vivid light- 
 ning. The unity of this and its impressiveness 
 are the work of a creative artist. Meryon 
 himself, with his more complete command of 
 the resources of the art of etching, would not 
 have denied the inspiration of this, nor of that 
 other conception, not a whit less forcibly exe- 
 cuted — The Murder on the Thames, in J 'ackSheppard. 
 
GEORGE GRUIKSHANK. 139 
 
 Neither the subjects habitually given to 
 Cruikshank, nor his own tastes, would have 
 allowed him to execute any large proportion 
 of his work in the tragic key struck so well 
 in The Last Chance and Miss Eske. Sometimes 
 melodrama remains pure melodrama with him, 
 and his art rivals the sensation scenes of the 
 contemporary theatre. So it is in one of the 
 illustrations to the Miser's Daughter (1842) — 
 Abel Beechcroft discovering the Body of the Miser in 
 the Cellar, a design striking enough, and felt 
 surely by Cruikshank before he made it, but, 
 in the actual execution, failing a little in truth 
 of effect of light and shade — a subject which 
 only great art could have redeemed or exalted ; 
 and the art here is of the order of melodrama. 
 And so too with the appalling invention in 
 "Jack Sheppard of the man who is thrown into 
 the very deep dark well from the treacherous 
 staircase from which a relentless enemy re- 
 solves to dislodge him. Melodrama certainly 
 — sensationalism certainly — the exciting end 
 of some middle act of the play, the impression 
 of which some / fitting reward of virtue in the 
 
140 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 final act shall presently relieve; but sensa- 
 tionalism here in absolute accord with the 
 literary purpose of the narrative, and carried 
 out with consummate skill in the suggestion 
 of horror. For the victim has not yet quite 
 fallen for ever into the hopeless pit whose 
 obscurity we cannot peer into. He has 
 clutched to staircase' railing with both hands: 
 one has been dislodged, and now he hangs, 
 garments awry and body asprawl towards the 
 depths, and the last fingers clutching their last 
 clutch, to shrink away, involuntarily, as the 
 cudgel of the murderer falls upon them, 
 and the struggle for life is over, before our 
 eyes. 
 
 A coarse public sups full, drinks deep, of 
 horrors; and I do not say that Cruikshank 
 would not have been popular by these things 
 alone. But it is pleasant to know that much 
 of his popularity was the result neither of vivid 
 imaginative rendering of things that were rightly 
 tragical, nor of rendering, horribly realistic 
 and repulsive, of the things of momentary sen- 
 sation, but of the skilled fruits of his own 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 141 
 
 sharp and daily observation of London street 
 and crowd, and of all places, from tavern to 
 court of justice, where his fellows gathered. 
 So, take the Sketches by Box, which preceded 
 the Twist and the Jack Sheppard and the Tower of 
 London, and look first at The Parish Engine. It. 
 has just arrived, and the pompous self-satisfied 
 officer is knocking at the door, calmly unmoved 
 in the excitement of alarm of fire. See the action 
 of the street boys, and that of those with the 
 engine, and that again of the aroused and in- 
 quiring neighbours. And the Court in Law 
 Life Assurance : a notable specimen of the em- 
 ployment of observant thought in work of 
 illustration : no background figure is without 
 his part, and his part Cruikshank has under- 
 stood and entered into ; the four judges, each 
 so different from the others, the pleading 
 counsel, the junior gossiping on his own affairs, 
 the stupid juryman, the keen-witted pertina- 
 cious juryman who will carry the verdict that 
 he chooses when the twelve retire. But a year 
 as early as 1828 shows us already some of the 
 neatest and daintiest satire on the fads of the 
 
H 2 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 estimable — gentle and sympathetic sarcasm on 
 the lengths to which the collector of rare things 
 will push his passion — amused observation on 
 the part of our artist of how regardless the 
 amateur may become of other objects of interest 
 than his own, his whole thought concentrated 
 on the importance of the little collector's 
 world — the Museum Print-room ; the sale room 
 at Sotheby's ; the shop of the dealer. For the 
 collector, in Cruikshank's middle life, was of a 
 type more pronounced than it is easy to find 
 in our day ; or rather, in our day he is to be 
 found chiefly among the aged, and is himself 
 as rare as the object he collects — this eccentric 
 and absorbed enthusiast, careless of raiment, 
 careless comparatively of food, who lives 
 fo).' many generations in the happiest pages of 
 -Cruikshank. 
 
 , In was in 1828 that the historical collector, 
 Wilson, who has left us the catalogue of Eem- 
 brandt's etchings still very generally in use in 
 England, had printed for the private entertain- 
 ment of his coterie a catalogue of his Select 
 Collection of Engravings ; and for it Cruikshank 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 143 
 
 etched, besides the Battle of Engravers, four 
 plates that narrate, so to say, the ever-recurring 
 incidents in the life of a connoisseur. There 
 is Connoisseurs at a Print Shop — the dealer has 
 returned from abroad, I suppose, his portfolios 
 freshly stocked with rarities, and he is show- 
 ing some of these at his counter to a happy 
 amateur for whom life has no keener moment, 
 while apart from the main group a solitary man 
 examines treasures in tranquil meditation, and 
 outside a*little crowd of the uninitiated gathers 
 before the cheap things hung in the window. 
 Then there is Connoisseurs at a Print Stall — a seedy 
 devotee of art — very much to be respected — 
 pausing before he parts with the money that will 
 enable him to carry home some treasure to lonely 
 chambers in Staple's Inn or shabby lodgings in 
 the Waterloo Road. Again, Connoisseurs at a Print 
 Sale — the indifference of some to the lot now 
 offered ; the consultations of more ; the quiet 
 observation of another ; the eager competition 
 of two, as the auctioneer, whose eye their bids 
 must not escape, has lifted the hammer that is 
 about to fall. And lastly, the Print Room in the 
 
144- STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 British Museum — a more modest apartment 
 than that now reigned oyer by Mr. Reid ; the 
 few connoisseurs who have come for purposes 
 of comparison are grouped in examination over 
 the print book ; the Keeper of the Prints stands, 
 holding forth to the habitues, with the keys of the 
 cabinet dangled from his fingers ; one other 
 figure, a lady learned in these mysteries, sitting 
 alone. And all this is pourtrayed with the 
 keenest point, with the readiest and most 
 familiar comprehension of the type and the 
 individual. 
 
 Great at need in tragic suggestion, and keen 
 at need in their pourtrayal of our little social 
 weaknesses or of our intellectual hobbies, the 
 illustrations of the best period of Cruikshank 
 are naturally the fullest of qualities more 
 peculiarly artistic — abound the most in such 
 quaint grace of line and happiness of touch as 
 may still be prized when the sprightliness of 
 their assault on the fancies or weaknesses of 
 their own day shall cease to be valued and 
 understood. It is so with these charming little 
 memoranda of the life of an old-fashioned con- 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 14S 
 
 noisseur; the artist shows great sensitiveness 
 to pleasant combinations of line in the small- 
 paned windows, the quaint doors of such shops 
 as remain to us now but here and there in 
 London. It is so with many of the Boz 
 illustrations, that one of the Parish Engine that 
 has been already spoken of being an excellent 
 example of Cruikshank's eye for picturesque 
 line and texture in some of the commonest 
 objects that met him in his walks ; the brick- 
 work of the house, for instance, prettily indi- 
 cated, and the woodwork of the outside shutters, 
 and the window, on which various lights are 
 pleasantly broken. I know no artist so alive 
 as Oruikshank to the pretty sedateness of 
 Georgian architecture. Then, too, there is the 
 girl with basket on arm, a figure not quite 
 ungraceful in line and gesture. She might 
 have been much better if Cruikshank had ever 
 made himself that accurate draughtsman of 
 the figure which he hardly essayed to be, and 
 she and all her fellows — it is only fair to 
 remember — might have been better again had 
 the artist who designed her done his finest 
 
146 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 work in a happier period of English dress. 
 The Sketches by Boz has one illustration perhaps 
 the best of all in Ouikshank as proof of that 
 sensitive eye for what is picturesque and cha- 
 racteristic in everyday London. It is called 
 The Streets, Morning, the design somewhat 
 empty of " subject :" only a comfortable sweep 
 who does not go up the chimney, and a 
 wretched boy who does, are standing at a stall 
 taking coffee, which a woman, with pattens 
 striking on pavement and head tied up close 
 in a handkerchief, serves to the scanty comers, 
 in the early morning light. A lamp-post rises 
 behind her ; the closed shutters of the baker 
 are opposite; the public-house of the ' Rising 
 Sun ' has not yet opened its doors ; at some 
 house-corner farther off, a solitary figure 
 lounges, homeless ; beyond, pleasant light 
 morning shadows cross the cool grey of the 
 untrodden street; a church tower and spire 
 rise in the delicate distance, where the turn of 
 the road hides the farther habitations of the 
 sleeping town. 
 
 The morality of Oruikshank — and he dwelt 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 147 
 
 greatly on his morality — the comedy and farce 
 of Cruikshank, which all the world has valued 
 — are to be had, no doubt, in all impressions, 
 all conditions of his plates, good or bad ; but 
 the artistic quality is to be found only in the 
 good impressions — in the impressions in which 
 the plate has suffered no ill-usage. Take Oliver 
 Twist, for instance, the first illustration of 
 which appeared in February, 1837, in Bentley's 
 Miscellany. When the story was finished in 
 the magazine, it and the illustrations appeared 
 in volumes for the library. At the end of 1 839, 
 I think, Charles Dickens bought the copy- 
 right back, and the plates with them. They 
 were issued by Chapman, by Bradbury, then 
 again by Chapman, and the world rightly is 
 glad enough to have them. But for the Oruik- 
 shank collector the plates should cease to be 
 precious after they have passed from the hands 
 of their first publisher, because, after Mr. 
 Bentley had sold them, they were retouched, 
 and coarsened when most completed. In the 
 Oliver Twist at Mrs. Maylie's Door, for example, 
 the fan-light, which shaded off so prettily at 
 
 1. 2 
 
148 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 first into the white of the paper, is mechanically 
 finished at the top, and the vividness of light 
 and shade on the door itself is spoilt by ad- 
 ditional lines, and by many of them. The life 
 has gone out of the thing. And even 
 among the original impressions, it is. the 
 sharpest and richest alone that have the full 
 beauty. 
 
 That is perhaps enough to say about the 
 illustrations to Dickens and to Ainsworth, as 
 they appear, in their etched form, in the 
 volumes themselves ; but the drawings in 
 water-colour — the first designs — for the same, 
 should be known where they can be. A sale 
 at Christie's in the summer of 1879 gave us the 
 opportunity of seeing many of the artist's best 
 works in the medium of water-colour, and of 
 ascertaining how far his control of that art 
 entitles him to be considered a serious master 
 of it. It seems that the most finished water- 
 colours of George Oruikshank are often the 
 least attractive ; when he works in water- 
 colour with the fullest lines and the most 
 persistent detail, the result is liable to disap- 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 149 
 
 point, though there are notable exceptions. 
 But he was none the less a quite excellent 
 master of water-colour sketching — a man able 
 to enrich with delicate colour, singularly con- 
 servative of aerial effect, the spaces left by the , 
 scanty but significant lines of his pencil draw- 
 ing. While he was reticent in his use of 
 colour, he used colour with extreme intelli- 
 gence ; it was with him extremely suggestive 
 of the actual scene which he had imagined and 
 was intent to depict ; it was not employed by 
 him primarily for pleasure in its harmonious 
 juxtapositions. In the realm of colour, as else* 
 where, Cruikshank was first — so to say — a dra- 
 matic, and only secondarily a technical artist. 
 But his manner of handling the brush was 
 nearly always, in pure sketches, masterly. He 
 knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he did 
 it quickly. A characteristic which has already 
 been noted in the etchings of Cruikshank — the 
 beauty and tenderness of his landscape back- 
 grounds of city street or square — is yet more 
 apparent in many of the tinted designs. He 
 had a very personal sense — such as comes pro- 
 
i 5 o STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 bably only to dwellers in the town — of the dainty 
 beauty of long street lines, or gabled houses, or 
 houses of the eighteenth century, seen through 
 the thin veil of mist which, even at the best, is 
 the atmosphere of London. The comparison 
 between his original design and his finished 
 etching on the copper is always interesting. 
 There was plenty of opportunity for it at the 
 sale at Christie's. It is found generally that 
 the etching is the better of the two where the 
 first design has been executed in sepia, for in 
 sepia Oruikshank was not particularly forcible. 
 But where the original design is in water- 
 colour, or pencil overlaid with water-colour, 
 it is probably more delicate than the etching, 
 and more satisfactory, unless the subject be 
 particularly tragic or sombre, in which case 
 the etching, with its black and white, has more 
 likelihood to be strong than has the delicately 
 tinted drawing. Thus the little drawing of the 
 Night before the Execution, with its pretty back- 
 ground of the gabled houses on Tower Green, 
 was very preferable to the etching as a whole, 
 for, though the etching has a force which the 
 
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 
 
 151 
 
 design lacked, the design had a delicacy missing 
 in the black and white. 
 
 As Cruikshank increased in years, he in- 
 creased in moralities. In very late days he 
 was able skilfully to re-engrave the plate which 
 represented the unfortunates who were hung 
 by the neck for forging one-pound notes — a 
 plate on which he prided himself as having, 
 very long ago, been a means of introducing 
 some mercy into punishment. And soon after 
 the time of the finer illustrations — at a period 
 when the artistic quality of his work was les- 
 sening — he produced The Bottle and The 
 Drunkard's Children, coarsely designed and 
 coarsely executed, yet very suggestive, very 
 full of that story-teller's power which was so 
 much Hogarth's and his own. He con- 
 tinued to labour. Quite in recent years he 
 must have executed a private plate for 
 Mr. Frederick Locker, which shows that 
 there were moments at least in which the 
 store of his fancy was not impoverished. No 
 more ingenious design could have been fur- 
 nished to a collector than this of Fairy Con- 
 
1 52 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 noisseurs examining Mr. Locker's treasures of 
 Diirer's, Rembrandt's, and Watteau's. For 
 Mr. Buskin, too, in 1866, there had been 
 designed the Piper of Hamelin, leading the 
 children" mountainwards with the spell of 
 his wonderful music. In 1870 a luxurious 
 edition of lngoldsby was supplied with a frontis- 
 piece representing the fertile Mr. Barham 
 surrounded by the creatures of his brain. And 
 yet more recent plates, the property of Mr. 
 Bell, the publisher — one of the Family Window, 
 and one in Lob lie by the Fire — show that Cruik- 
 shank did not wholly outlive his talent. What 
 he outlived was the social conditions he had 
 illustrated and satirised in his prime— the 
 social conditions he had best comprehended. 
 Dying as it were only, yesterday, he belongs so 
 much to the Past, because, though his period 
 of production did not, while he was yet living, 
 seem long over, his time of receptiveness was 
 gone by. As a satirist he belonged in spirit to 
 another generation : we could not ask him to 
 grapple, at fourscore years, with the foibles of 
 ours. 
 
WILLIAM HUNT AND PROUT. 
 
WILLIAM HUNT AND PROUT. 
 
 William Hunt and Samuel Prout suffer the 
 discredit of being neither new enough to be 
 fashionable nor old enough to be classic. 
 Theirs is the disadvantage, just in our time, 
 of belonging to the last generation — of repre- 
 senting, therefore, it may be presumed, dis- 
 carded ways, methods of art upon which we 
 have improved, ideals we have overpassed. 
 The aestheticism of the day has left them far 
 behind, nor will Mr. Ruskin's advocacy of them 
 in his lately issued Notes be even so much as 
 listened to by those sagacious people who find it 
 difficult to realise the fact that it is pos- 
 sible to be a perfect master of the English 
 language and a good judge of painting. That 
 
156 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 persons busy only with " attributions " should 
 regard thought, feeling, and imagination as 
 superfluous in criticism is of course to be ex- 
 pected — " fine writing ' ' is naturally the name 
 applied to Mr. Ruskin's literature by those 
 who cannot be literary at all. Bub it seems 
 that with some even of the more enlightened — 
 with some of those who care for Art because of 
 the beauty and the meaning in Art — Mr. 
 B/uskin is at a discount; our greatest critic 
 has been a critic too long to reflect accurately 
 the opinion of the moment among cultivated 
 folk. His, too, has been the irreparable 
 mistake of appearing as a voice crying in 
 the wilderness, instead of as one babbling 
 smooth things of prosperous people met in 
 society. Yet a few simple persons still 
 believe that when he expresses an opinion 
 upon Art, there is good reason at least for en- 
 quiring somewhat studiously into the grounds 
 of it. Without acquiescing inevitably in his 
 judgments, these simple persons yet dare to 
 cherish the superstition that a peculiar measure 
 of insight was once vouchsafed to him, and that 
 
HUNT AND PROUT. 157 
 
 it has not yet been allowed to depart. They 
 are willing to look more carefully at Prout and 
 Hunt because Mr. Ruskin has held these 
 artists to be worthy of patient analysis. And, 
 indeed there is a good deal besides that may 
 justify some revival of interest in this humble 
 and old-fashioned work, though doubtless the 
 spectator must be either happily simple or 
 decidedly learned if he is to care very actively 
 for Prout's drawings or for William Hunt's. 
 The gestheticism of the day can find little to 
 like in these sincere and unambitious masters. 
 Between Prout and Hunt there would seem 
 at first to be but little connexion. The sub- 
 jects of Samuel Prout and the subjects of 
 "William Hunt are united neither by likeness 
 nor by such contrast as may make the one 
 complementary of the other. But the works 
 of the two men were brought together in 
 a public gallery because, at all events in 
 Mr. Ruskin's opinion, the one is a master 
 of painting, the other of pure draughtsman- 
 ship. The one is complementary of the other 
 in this sense at least, and their generation was 
 
158 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the same, the class of citizens for whom they 
 worked generally the same. They worked for 
 limited, bourgeois buyers — genuine lovers of Art, 
 for all that — who lived before fashionable 
 people had to pretend to care about Art, and 
 before artists began to think that they must 
 pretend to be fashionable. Simple tastes were 
 gratified by Prout and William Hunt, and it 
 was simple men who pleased these tastes. 
 
 I cannot help thinking that it is possible to 
 exaggerate the actual painter's quality in Wil- 
 liam Hunt, and to do so while recognising 
 perfectly the limitations of Hunt's ideal — 
 even the occasional vulgarity of conception 
 in Hunt's work. For vulgar Hunt could cer- 
 tainly be, and not only in his roughest sub- 
 jects. His urchins are at times forbidding; 
 and when they are forbidding he is not re- 
 pelled by them ; but what is more vulgar than 
 his most forbidding urchins is his servant girl 
 arraying herself in her mean finery. A ser- 
 vant girl is not, I suppose, inevitably a bad 
 subject for art. A French bonne or a trim 
 English "young person" —neither has been 
 
HUNT AND PROUT. 159 
 
 found impossible or even very difficult material. 
 But when the "young person" is not trim — 
 when she is bedecked in shabby gauds — when 
 the " young person" is five-and-thirty ! It is 
 then that William Hunt inclines to paint her, 
 and the result as well as the theme is of hope- 
 less vulgarity — is a thing from which Art, 
 which should be pleasure-giving, is removed 
 how far ! 
 
 Very frankly and impartially Mr. Ruskin 
 himself has admitted this. But he has not 
 seen what many now think they see — that 
 "William Hunt was at least sometimes a less 
 consummate master of pure painting than his 
 indulgent contemporaries, towards the end of 
 his career, were inclined to reckon him. We 
 may allow his excellence in the still-life he 
 greatly loved ; we may grant, perhaps, the 
 ^pgff-fection of the famous butterfly which Mr. 
 Ripskin tells us is " as good as Titian or any- 
 body else ever did" — the perfection of the 
 English hot-house grapes — the happier per- 
 fection of the hawthorn spray. But we must 
 note, I think, that when still-life is left aside 
 
160 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 with what after all must be its comparative 
 facility, and when William Hunt betakes him- 
 self to the painting of interiors, to the grap- 
 pling with atmospheric effects, the triumphant 
 mastery is hardly visible any more. There is 
 a fair success in the place of it. But it is a 
 success that leaves the Dutch painters of 
 interiors still far ahead of William Hunt. 
 Here and there it seems there is an exception. 
 A little water-colour lately bought for the 
 National Gallery of Dublin is a wonderful 
 union of simple story-telling with excellent 
 painting. It is a kitchen or a cottage interior, 
 sunny with the light of afternoon, and tidy 
 with the tidiness of Sunday afternoon. The 
 one occupant, a rosy girl with warm-coloured 
 hair, has been trying to read a good book in 
 the sunshine and the stillness, and has suc- 
 cumbed to both — the warm head has dropped 
 aside in unmistakable slumber. The scene is 
 perfectly painted, the story perfectly told. 
 
 But such painter's quality as we see in this, 
 or even such painter's quality as we see in 
 the best hawthorn sprays, the best bird's- 
 
EUNT AND PROUT. 161 
 
 nests, the best plums or quinces, is not shown 
 always ; and extremest praise of the still-life 
 of Hunt implies injustice to more than one 
 other painter, and notably, to Chardin. The 
 still-life of Ghardin is painted never less per- 
 fectly than Hunt's; the elaboration of it is 
 never visible ; for want of a better expression 
 I must say that it is artistically, that it is 
 largely done. And Chardin, too, had con- 
 spicuously the very virtue Mr. Ruskin claims 
 for "William Hunt — he did not paint still-life 
 for the gratification of the luxurious or the 
 glory of the rich. He loved matter, vegetable 
 matter say, for its own sake, for its hue and 
 lustre, its purity of colour ] or when he loved 
 it and painted it for its association, it was 
 for its association with humble life and with 
 homely and frugal provision. Many painters 
 have been engaged in the painting of costly 
 fruit loaded on costly plate. They must have 
 got their idea of the fruits of the earth from the 
 dessert of a City Company. It was not so with 
 "William Hunt, though he loved the grape better 
 than the pear, and the melon better than the 
 
 M 
 
162 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 apple. Still less was it so with Chardin, who was 
 simple always, and always contentedly bourgeois. 
 It is only fair to say of William Hunt that, 
 notwithstanding his occasional lapses into vul- 
 garity of theme — a vulgarity all the more 
 offensive because it is accompanied by such a 
 patient elaboration of execution — he is yefc 
 pre-eminently the painter of hearty and honest 
 country-folk, of a simple peasantry, "their 
 country's pride." Many examples in the com- 
 plete list of Hunt's work show this, but no- 
 thing shows it better than two drawings which 
 were in the Bond Street exhibition, and one of 
 which is to be found reproduced in Mr. 
 Buskin's Notes. The one so chosen is Mr. 
 Orrock's drawing of The Shy Sitter — a young 
 girl whose awkwardness seems at first wholly 
 repellent, as she wriggles uneasily on her 
 chair, an unwilling model, her brown eyes, 
 soft and timid as a hare's, still curious as to 
 the result of the sitting. There is humour 
 here, but not obtrusive humour — nothing to 
 mar the fidelity of the record of character. 
 But the yet finer drawing is that which is 
 
HUNT AND PROUT. 163 
 
 called The Blessing; in sentiment just such a 
 grace before meat as Chardin, by-the-bye, 
 painted more than once — Hunt's rival, it seems, 
 and, I think, a successful one, in record of 
 humble character as well as in still-life. The 
 Blessing has been etched by Mr. Waltner, and 
 separately published. It is a thing quite un- 
 surpassed for natural simplicity, natural piety, 
 a certain homely and saddened sweetness ; and 
 as a portrait of serene old age it is only inferior, 
 if it is inferior at all, to Gainsborough's picture 
 of Orpin, the Parish Clerk. 
 
 To pass from the selected colourist to the 
 selected draughtsman. Photography is sup- 
 posed to have crushed Prout because it renders 
 just the architectural detail which was indicated 
 well enough by his delicate pencillings. And 
 in giving to us that which seems in Prout's 
 art the facile picturesqueness of old cities, 
 photography has, no doubt, done something, 
 if not to supersede Prout, at all events to 
 supersede the necessity for him. Something 
 on ]y — for photography works merely with light 
 
 m 2 
 
1 64 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 and shade, and is without the invaluable service 
 of definite line — but still something. That is 
 because his touch was more individual than 
 his mind. An individuality more marked than 
 Prout's, an imagination stronger and more 
 personal, has nothing to fear from photography 
 even when it is exereised with cities. What 
 has M£ryon to fear from photography ? What 
 has Girtin ? The one, even apart from the 
 imaginative and creative side of his work, so 
 mastered the last subtleties of light and shade, 
 and was so at home with the characteristics of 
 the architecture he loved, that with his art no 
 craft of mechanical reproduction ever enters 
 into competition. The other — Girtin — was 
 quietly great in composition : pictorial and 
 dignified without sense of violent departure 
 from the actual scene ; but Prout himself was 
 often that — and instance after instance of his 
 greatness in it Mr. Euskin has ingeniously 
 pointed out. What really saved Girtin wholly 
 from the rivalry of the photographer was his 
 happy employment of sober colour, his control 
 of subdued tone. 
 
HUNT AND PROUT. 165 
 
 Prout did nothing as individual as either of 
 these men, for his draughtmanship, though 
 accurate and terse, was less expressive than 
 Meryon's, and less noble — it was colder, less 
 passionate — and his colour was never as happy 
 as Grirtin's ; never so blended or so charming. 
 The more Meryon finished an etching — I mean 
 the less of a sketch it was — the finer it became. 
 And, among Grirtin's water-colours it is those 
 which are the most completed that express 
 him most perfectly — that do the greatest 
 justice to his art. But Prout's most considered 
 works, the finished water-colours for the 
 Water-Colour Society's exhibition, are among 
 his least satisfactory ; he is best before the 
 short-hand has passed into long-hand — he is 
 best as a sketcher. 
 
 Prout, though he was not imaginative, in- 
 troduced into his drawings more of voluntary 
 and stated composition than is generally 
 believed. An abstract and brief chronicle of 
 the city of Amiens, establishes this. The 
 finest point of view, where many are fine, is 
 almost invariably taken : a figure is introduced 
 
1 66 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 where the balance of the design or the tendency 
 of its lines requires it ; and the transition is 
 very artful and skilful, whether gradual or 
 abrupt, from the precision that would be called 
 photographic to the selected scribble that is 
 certainly significant. His study of Gothic 
 taught him to be occupied with the picturesque 
 — towards which, indeed, he was inclined — so 
 that it was still the picturesque which he wished 
 to discover in the Renaissance. To the delicacy 
 and refinement of the Renaissance he was not 
 always alive. 
 
 In his pencil sketches, as in his great water- 
 colours, Prout had a mannerism, but not an 
 affectation ; that is to say, the thing that was 
 peculiar to him — that constituted his man- 
 nerism — was a trick and skill of the hand, and 
 not a mental attitude consciously adopted. 
 He was a draughtsman of stone, not wood ; 
 and the limitation implies a mannerism. As 
 age advances, most men wax somewhat care- 
 less in their art, either with the hurry of 
 lassitude or the speed of assured power. But 
 as time went on the sketches of Prout in- 
 
HUNT AND PROUT. 167 
 
 creased in carefulness of finish and accuracy of 
 detail, and Mr. KusMn holds himself partly to 
 blame for this ; he allows that the sketches of 
 Prout's middle period are the best; in the 
 later work the artist lost in feeling as he 
 gained in minute accuracy. With regard to 
 the absence of individuality in Prout's mind — 
 the absence of individual vision — that absence 
 had its little compensation in the fact that 
 Prout could give at all events what the world 
 saw, and what was " demonstrably there," 
 Turner, his greatest interpreter has told us, 
 gave the scene and himself too, " and ever so 
 much of fairyland besides." And glad I am 
 that he did ! 
 
 There is one point in which Mr. Euskin 
 holds Prout to be the equal of Turner. Nay, 
 he goes further, and says that it is a point in 
 which only Prout is the equal of Turner. 
 " Prout was and remains the only one of our 
 artists who entirely shared Turner's sense of 
 magnitude as the sign of past human effort or 
 natural force." And he adds — no doubt, most 
 truly — " of all forms of artistic susceptibility, 
 
1 68 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 reverent perception of true magnitude is the 
 rarest." Now, it is clear that Prout had this 
 sense of true magnitude. His drawing of the 
 Drachenfeh — to name one drawing only — shows 
 it completely. That deals with Nature; but 
 there is question also of the sense of magnitude 
 in the works of men, and here I think the very 
 artists whom in these short words on Prout 
 I have most had need to mention — Grirtin and 
 Meryon — had it just as perfectly. It was sense 
 of scale and of size, more at least than beauty 
 of detail, that gave to Grirtin' s architectural 
 work much of its charm; and who can say that 
 the sign of such sense is absent from the Abside, 
 from the Rue des Chantres, from the Arche du 
 Pont Notre-Dame, of Meryon ? 
 
MERYON. 
 
MERYON. 
 
 1821— 1868. ' 
 
 Now more than half a century ago, a London 
 physician — suave, immaculate, irreproachable 
 after his kind — met, followed, and captured a 
 Paris dancing-girl ; and the offspring of their 
 loves, such as they were, was the great artist, 
 Meryon. The offspring of their loves being 
 that great artist, with a spirit at once the most 
 original, imaginative, and persistent, a hand 
 at once the most delicate and the strongest, 
 one is curious to know whether the germ 
 of some fine quality of his, in passion or skill, 
 cannot have been inherited — whether the 
 unlicensed connection which gave him birth 
 
172 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 had indeed some heart in it, or whether it 
 was but the vulgar and shabby intrigue of the 
 green room and the cabinet particulier. 
 
 The truest, the most trustworthy story we 
 are likely to get, answers that question not 
 quite in the darkest way. Meryon was one of 
 two children, and the other, a girl, was taken 
 to England by her father, the physician, and 
 there, in spite of the disadvantages and diffi- 
 culties of her birth, there was made for her 
 what the teller of the story describes to me as 
 " a brilliant marriage." She took her place in 
 the world. Meryon himself — Charles Meryon, 
 born in 1821 — remained with his mother, 
 whom after some years the father seems to 
 have entirely quitted ; the cause of it, again I 
 hear, the offensiveness of the children's grand- 
 mother. The vulgarity of the old, of the 
 frowsy, of the unattractive, is a vulgarity one 
 cannot endure ; and the woman who allowed 
 to Meryon' s mother the life she led — nay, who 
 urged her, it is said, to a worse — is not likely 
 to have brightened for the physician the nar- 
 row Paris home into which this and that 
 
M fin YON. 173 
 
 intolerable relative of the dancer he had lived 
 with would be prone to insinuate herself unbid- 
 den and un desired. The physician went his way, 
 taking, as I have said, the daughter with him, 
 and leaving the son to the mother, and making 
 her some not inconsiderable gift of money, pro- 
 bably even for some years a stated and sufficient 
 allowance. At all events, in Meryon's child- 
 hood and boyhood the means of living did not 
 seem to be lacking. He was destined for the 
 navy, and entered it at the right moment, 
 leaving it to be an artist when still a young 
 man and a lieutenant. Meryon had owed to 
 his father fair material provision for his life. 
 To his mother — the sensitiveness, fineness, 
 and passion of whose nature he believed he 
 had inherited — he owed the hourly cares and 
 thoughts for him that were much of her 
 existence. Her life went out in obscurity, 
 under the cloud of illicit ways, in the fettered 
 freedom of a demi-monde, when he was a youth ; 
 and perhaps the most impulsive and resolute, 
 the most imaginative and nervous, of all the 
 youth of Paris was left surrounded at 
 
r 74 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the best, as regards kindred, by a vulgar 
 entourage of pochard and canaille, in a strange 
 loneliness. 
 
 His nature had the combined gentleness and 
 fire of a man of genius ; the fire ready to flare 
 out when work was to be done or opposition to 
 be encountered ; the gentleness to be bestowed 
 in the rare moments of sympathetic friendship. 
 The people who knew him in his later time — 
 artists, critics, kind-hearted connoisseurs, fel- 
 low-workers, companions — say that he had the 
 charm of genius. He was pleasant to be with. 
 His obstinacy, however, was from the first as 
 indomitable as his activity at the last was 
 nervous and unhealthy. In the Peninsular of 
 Banks, in New Zealand, during his long voyage 
 round the world, he and his comrades were 
 forbidden to make use of the captain's little 
 boat, and their pride was touched by the 
 restraint. Meryon himself would make a boat, 
 he said. A tree was hewn for the purpose, a 
 tent set up for Meryon near the shore, but 
 within range of wild beasts. There for three 
 months young Meryon worked, his food 
 
M&RYON. 175 
 
 brought to bim by his fellows, his hands raw 
 with the persistency of his labour. The 
 boat once launched, the captain was moved 
 to admiration. It should be set up at home, 
 he declared, in the naval arsenal of Toulon. 
 Somewhere or other there it must now be. 
 
 The artistic instinct of MeVyon made naval 
 life distasteful. Abandoning the navy, and 
 finding that there were substantial obstacles to 
 his becoming a painter, he determined to be an 
 engraver, and entering after a while the atelier 
 of M. Bl^ry, he left it in 1 8 50, at the age of 
 twenty-nine, to take humble chambers in the 
 Rue St. Btienne du Mont, and to live if possible 
 by the steady pursuit of his art. Those were 
 the days of the beginning of our modern practice 
 of the art of etching. Bracquemond and Flameng 
 were young: Jules Jacquemart was a lad. The 
 two first, at least, lived somewhat in the society 
 of Meryon. Bracquemond etched two portraits 
 of him ; in one he is sitting in a chair, in the 
 other he is as a face carved in bas-relief in 
 marble. " Messire Bracquemond," wrote 
 Meryon, in the quaint verses he even then 
 
176 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 affected, and which subsequently he was wont 
 to set under certain of his prints : — 
 
 " Messire Bracquemond 
 A peint en cette image 
 Le sombre Meryon 
 Au grotesque visage." 
 
 A French critic, availing himself of the 
 publicity of the Gazette des Beaux- Arts, in 1863, 
 gave a catalogue of Meryon' s work, which 
 for practical purposes was for the moment 
 sufficient.* Some arbitrary classification was 
 attempted by this chronicler ; but, unless one is 
 writing for the collector alone, it is one broad 
 division that chiefly requires to be made. For 
 it was when Me>yon, after years of absence, had 
 returned for the first time a man to the city of 
 his birth, and while he was employed for 
 money's sake in much insignificant and me- 
 chanical labour of copying, which even an 
 original engraver, until great fame has reached 
 him, can hardly escape— it was at this time, 
 and in the midst of work which served only its 
 
 * I am indebted to conversation with M. Burtv for one or two of 
 the particulars contained in this chapter. 
 
M&BYON. 177 
 
 purpose of the hour and day, that Meryon had 
 that vision of Paris, the ultimate realization of 
 which, with passion and with patience, lifted 
 him into the- rank of the greatest artists that 
 can be. 
 
 Meryon's work, then, may be broadly divided 
 into two classes : first, the work done mainly 
 in his earliest time, after drawings of many 
 subjects by old French and other artists — 
 Renier Zeeman, the Dutchman, was one of 
 these ; — and second, the sometimes partly 
 original, but oftener wholly original work, in 
 which best of all he recorded the characteristics 
 of the Paris of his own day, and yet of the 
 Middle Age, which were passing away under 
 the improving hands of the Second Empire in 
 its first years. There are also the New Zealand 
 views, drawn if not etched very early, and the in- 
 significant or bizarre fancies of his latter days, 
 when his mind declined; but the work of 
 artistic interest is that in which he recorded 
 Old Paris, and he did this well in the etchings 
 which were copies of old drawings which his 
 art and feeling had made into finer pictures, 
 
178 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 and supremely well in the etchings which were 
 wholly original. 
 
 Fancy him, then, established in a lonely way, 
 and yet of course with some artistic comrades 
 within reach, in the cabin-like rooms of the 
 humblest floor of the street, the north side of 
 which is occupied by the church that gives that 
 street its name — St. Etienne du Mont— and 
 which Meryon made the subject of one of the 
 most harmonious and mysterious of his works. 
 I went one evening in the spring of '77 to see 
 the church and street : the street itself will 
 have historic interest as that from which so 
 many of Meryon's finest etchings are dated ; 
 but I went chiefly to see, in a way in which 
 hardly any other of the subjects of his pictures 
 would allow one to see, how much or little of 
 voluntary artistic composition entered into his 
 work of record. Not much here, as far as 
 concerns the mere lines of his plate, though the 
 light and shade on the St. Etienne were his 
 own. The Gothic college to the left had dis- 
 appeared — was threatening no doubt to disap- 
 pear when he executed his print. But the 
 
M&RYON. 179 
 
 church itself which remained — of that his 
 record had been absolutely and delicately 
 faithful, both the building and its position, half 
 behind the massive angle of the Pantheon. 
 The humble rooms he lived in, on that side of 
 the church not seen in the picture, must have 
 looked upon the church's bare south wall. 
 The quarter, in any journey from reputable 
 parts of Paris, would be reached by passage 
 from richer street to poorer, and so to poorer 
 again. A lost quarter, even behind and beyond 
 the shabbiest of the quarters of students ; 
 around it, in strange lanes, the dwellings of 
 the chiffonniers, the rag-gatherers, who with 
 basket on back cluster towards it at midnight 
 from nightly search among offal and gutter, 
 and wander out from it once more when even- 
 ing has come again, to spread themselves over 
 the town. Beyond it an undiscovered country, 
 known only to the police and to the workers in 
 strange trades plied in remote places. There 
 Meryon lived. 
 
 That old-world quarter of Paris— a lost 
 quarter, a quarter seemingly deserted, yet 
 
 N 2 
 
180 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 thickly peopled all the while — was favourable 
 to Meryon's art, to the growth of his imagina- 
 tion, to the strength and endurance of the, im- 
 pression which the mysterious and crowded 
 city made on him in these the first years of 
 his living there in manhood. He began his 
 study of Paris, observing consciously the 
 quaint combinations of window and house- 
 roof, the chimneys, the tourelles in quiet 
 back streets, narrow blind lanes where the 
 Middle Age lingered, and perhaps not less 
 consciously taking note of that moral aspect 
 of Paris which was to colour his work and to 
 bring into strange and new juxtaposition ele- 
 ments of beauty and horror the fascination of 
 whose union he was almost the first to appre- 
 ciate. A high literary genius, "Victor Hugo, 
 had blended beauty and horror in his great 
 romance, Notre Dame de Paris, which Paris 
 had inspired. But in pictorial art Meryon was 
 to be alone, and the Paris that he pictured was 
 pictured in a way only too much his own — only 
 too much above and beyond the valuing of 
 those to whom he first submitted his work. 
 
M&BYON. i%i 
 
 I went one day into a shop of a little- 
 known dealer, and asked for Meryon's etch- 
 ings. " Views of Paris ?" he answered, and 
 knew what I meant ; but knew no better than 
 did the print-sellers of the artist's own lifetime 
 how entirely these things were pictures, how 
 much they were visions. "Well, with little 
 encouragement, Meryon did his work — none 
 the less priceless as a record because it bore 
 on it too the mark of his own sentiment — did 
 the etching of St. Btienne, of the Tour de 
 l'Horloge, of the Cathedral of Notre Dame 
 seen from behind and from over the water, 
 from places now strangely changed ; did the 
 etching of the thick and speechless uncom- 
 municative walls of the Rue des Mauvais Garfons 
 (Baudelaire's favourite), and " the Doric little 
 Morgue," the quay alive with the bustle and 
 excitement of an instant of horrible arrival. 
 He did these things, and took them to the 
 dealers. One refused, and another. Wrap- 
 ping up his portfolio, he went on again— 
 tramped* lonely and unencouraged, round the 
 Paris he was beginning to hate. 
 
182 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 Disappointment and neglect soon told upon 
 the delicate organization of .the artisb. Whim- 
 sical he had always, been; exaggerated in his 
 hates and loves and in the very efforts of his 
 will ; and now some years of poverty and 
 isolation — some years of the production, 
 amidst complete indifference, of immense and 
 immortal work— began to thrust into pro- 
 
 , minence those traits in his character which 
 could not be noticed without suspicion and 
 fear. He fell violently in love with some little 
 girl of the humble and uneducated class — a 
 
 fillette de cremerie, a bright young woman, who 
 stood, I suppose, behind the counter of the shop 
 at which he got his morning meal. The charm 
 of the man in his pleasant hours, his genius, his 
 spirit, the prodigious skill of his hand, were 
 less apparent to the Parisian shop-girl than 
 the surprises of his wayward temper, his 
 exaltation, his not unfrequent gloom. It was 
 no use, his passion and beseeching — elle ne 
 voulait pas de lui. She stood aloof, and he at 
 last went on his way, embittered and saddened. 
 The hardness of his living, the neglect of his 
 
MERYON. 183 
 
 art, the deprivation even of personal pleasure, of 
 the excitement of love — these things curdled in 
 his brain, and hallucinations crowded round him. 
 He had one constant and most kind patron 
 and encourager — Monsieur " Mel, librarian at 
 the Ministry of the Interior, who had tried, 
 and not always without success, to get him 
 commissions, and who was forming even then 
 by purchase, when the prints had no re- 
 cognized value, what was destined to be the 
 earliest of the great collections of Meryon's 
 work. Meeting this gentleman one day, 
 Meryon looked aside with a frown and an 
 expression of injury and grievance. He would 
 have nothing to say to M. Mel. " Foyons" 
 said M. Mel ; " what is it then, Meryon ?" " You 
 rob me," was the answer, " and make a profit by 
 my work." Another day, a critic, who among the 
 earliest had recognised the genius of Meryon 
 to create and interpret — to throw his spirit 
 and the very spirit of Paris into his record of 
 the semblance of its stones — met him in similar 
 mood. " The money that you owe me," said 
 Meryon, when he was forced to speak. But 
 
1 84 STUIDES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 there was no money owed between them at 
 all. 
 
 And so the artist, sufficiently neglected 
 indeed from without, came to carry within 
 him his most implacable enemies. In his 
 imagination, they lingered in wait behind the 
 corners of the streets — would be down upon 
 him to distress and thwart him if he paused 
 long or was heedless of who approached. And 
 so with nervous and frightened eye, but with 
 hand still keenly obedient and splendidly con- 
 trolled, he stood on some empty space of quay, 
 sketching, as his wont had been, with the 
 finest of pencil points, the angles of house and 
 church, bits of window, roof and chimney, 
 to be afterwards pieced carefully together 
 and used in the etching of the plate. The 
 strokes drawn by his pencil were often drawn 
 upwards instead of downwards. Often the 
 sketches were discarded: the point of view 
 had not been the right one. Thus I have seen 
 a drawing of the Pompe Notre-Dame, taken 
 from under a bridge whose arch, as an 
 element in the picture, prominent in the fore- 
 
M&BYON. 185 
 
 ground, he afterwards removed. There is 
 a drawing, too, for the right side of his Abside 
 de Notre-Dame, in which the line of varied 
 house-roofs is higher than in the plate. He 
 saw subsequently that the houses must be lower, 
 smaller, and more distant, to give the sense of 
 height and domination and an almost lonely 
 grandeur to the structure of the cathedral that 
 rises dark and solemn against the evening sky. 
 
 These things, by which a perfect composition 
 was generally attained, he saw of course 
 during those best days — the years of 1850 to 
 1854 — in which he was doing the masterpieces 
 of his work. Later, the skill of the hand was 
 guided by no keen judgment nor sane imagina- 
 tion ; at last the plates, or some of them, in cer- 
 tain of their states, were disfigured by imaging 
 the fancies of a mind rebellious or vanished. 
 
 Presently — it was at a time when he had 
 done his finest work, but had not as yet 
 drifted into madness — Meryon removed for a 
 while to Brussels : a commission, obtained at 
 the instance of M. Niel, awaiting him from 
 the Due d'Aremberg. Soon he came back. 
 
1 86 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 It was in the beginning of 1858, and he in- 
 stalled himself in the Eue des Fosses-Saint- 
 Jacques. There his illness more completely 
 declared itself. Discouraged, overwhelmed, 
 with his failure, he gave up life : the common 
 mechanical activities of life : the trouble of 
 dressing, undressing, eating — down even to 
 these small things, his energy was gone. He 
 could not be roused from his bed. His friends 
 at that time, recognizing that his career was 
 in the past — believing that almost on any day 
 they might hear that he was dead or in the 
 madhouse— brought one night the artist 
 Plameng to his bedside, and Flameng made 
 there a drawing of him, of which a reproduction 
 has since been published. That night, or a day 
 or two afterwards, he became dangerous, and 
 they took him away to Charenton in a cab. 
 
 The order, the care, of the great maison de 
 sante rapidly influenced him, and after some 
 period of probation, during which he did some 
 copyist's work in his art, he was discharged. 
 In his new lodging of the Rue Duperre* he 
 retouched his coppers. Arrangements were 
 
ME BY ON. 187 
 
 made for the publication of one or two of them 
 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and in the Fine 
 Arts Quarterly Review ; others, retouched, were 
 printed anew by Delatre — those especially that 
 had not before been printed by this printer of 
 exceptional and unequalled skill. But no success 
 of a substantial kind came to Meryon's work in 
 Meryon's life. His days were more and more 
 agitated ; the sense of failure preyed on him, 
 though it was not to that that he attributed his 
 illness. " I became mad," said Meryon, "the day 
 I was going to sea, when I was a boy and they 
 told me of my birth. The shock of it made me 
 mad." That was very probably a fancy. 
 
 In 1867 he returned to Oharenton, there 
 thinking himself no longer Meryon, but some 
 saintly character of some far-off time; and 
 there, next year, obstinately refusing susten- 
 ance, because he said that there was not food 
 enough in the world, and he was getting more 
 than his share— there, in February, 1868, he 
 died. " Sa barque" as an old comrade of his on 
 the high seas saidfinely at his grave — " sa barque, 
 a tout instant noyee, cour ait sans reps au naufrage" 
 
188 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 Long afterwards, one curious and careful to 
 know about his life went to Charenton for par- 
 ticulars — Charenton, outside Paris ; the gaunt 
 white house in the bareish land. Did the 
 Doctor remember Meryon ? " M£ryon — 
 Meryon? No. Let us see, however." And 
 he consulted a book. "Meryon? Oh, yes. 
 Number six hundred and forty-three. See 
 here — a man who at the last was writing inco- 
 herent memorials. I will show them you." 
 And, ringing the bell, " Send down here the 
 portfolios of No. 643." 
 
 The immense artist — number six hundred 
 and forty-three ! 
 
 What was the artist's work ? 
 
 The original work of Meryon was called into 
 -being, so to say, by the destruction of Old 
 Paris, which he looked upon not so much 
 with an antiquarian as with an artistic and 
 personal regret. Had Meryon been genuinely 
 antiquarian, he would have sketched details of 
 architecture with a colder correctness, but with 
 less of living force. As it was, he loved 
 
M^B YON. 189 
 
 architecture, and knew it more widely than 
 any artist before. The great strength of his 
 draughtsmanship lay indeed in its representa- 
 tion, and all the styles he represented he repre- 
 sented with equal power ; but in the under- 
 current of his work there is the mood of 
 passion of an individual mind. Therefore his 
 work combines, and will combine still more iu 
 the future (when the actual remembrance of 
 the things it commemorates shall have passed 
 away), a certain antiquarian interest, dear to 
 some, and valuable no doubt to all, with that 
 much higher interest of work of an intense 
 personality — work which no one could do 
 before, and which no one has done since. 
 
 Likely enough, no other circumstance than 
 the passing away of that old vesture of the 
 city which he loved would have roused him to 
 the complete expression of himself in art. 
 His earlier work, after good masters, is adroit, 
 but hardly personal. Some skill to speak in 
 his art had begun to come before the substance 
 to be spoken. Afterwards he failed as a 
 painter : some attempts at painting, during 
 
190 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the early Paris years, having proved to him 
 not only the presence of manual and technical 
 difficulties hard to overcome, but a defective 
 vision for colour, so that green was seen by 
 him as red. The defectiveness of vision for 
 colour had its compensation in an absolutely 
 exceptional sensitiveness to tone and grada- 
 tion. Etching was his art ; and in the etch- 
 ing of Paris this mysterious and brooding 
 spirit, whose care was for the Past and the 
 familiar — never the new — found his particular 
 work. His sympathetic interest in his every 
 subject, in the place, in the association, in the 
 spirit of the scene, as well as in the lines and 
 lights which he followed with so infinite a 
 subtlety, divides his chronicle of Paris utterly 
 from all others that artists have made of cities 
 — gives it a unity, lacking, say, to that dili- 
 gent and not unpicturesque record which 
 Wenceslaus Hollar made of the London of the 
 Commonwealth. And so it is that his work 
 has a personal stamp and charm of his own 
 imagination enriching the bare walls and totter- 
 ing houses — a charm recalling by that imagina- 
 
M&RYON. 191 
 
 tive quality the literary work of Victor Hugo 
 in Notre Dame de Paris, and of the great 
 English master in The Tale of Two Cities and 
 in Barnaby Rudge. And that imaginative, 
 that personal quality, joined to manual dex- 
 terity likewise unsurpassed, makes his etched 
 work the greatest and the most profoundly 
 personal of any done since Rembrandt's. 
 
 Putting aside the drier and less artistic 
 among the copies of other men's work, and a 
 few minor records that were wholly his own — 
 such as the Minister e de la Marine , say, and the 
 Bain Froid Chevrier — Meryon executed during 
 his four great years, from 1850 to 1854, some 
 dozen and a half or twenty plates, which in 
 their ensemble guarantee his fame. A very 
 limited number of impressions having been 
 taken in the course of successive years, 
 Meryon himself at last destroyed the plates 
 
 ploughed deep burin lines across them, 
 
 in a moment of despair, Mr. Hamerton 
 informs us. I thank Heaven he did. For 
 the truth is, if that was madness, there 
 was much method in it. The plates 
 
192 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 were used up hopelessly ; and though no 
 doubt they might have been again retouched, 
 steeled, and so reproduced by the thousand in 
 the poorest of their forms, the artist in destroy- 
 ing them did in the main but protect us from 
 the eventual outpouring, in the interests of the 
 shop, of masses of misleading impressions, 
 libels upon his art. His works are rare — the 
 best of them, in the best states, very rare ; but 
 there are enough of them, as there are enough 
 of Eembrandts and of the Liber prints of 
 Turner, to be seen by those anxious to see, 
 and not too many to be cherished and held 
 as precious things. Etchings are works of 
 highest art only on the condition that the im- 
 pressions are of finest quality. The sharp- 
 ness of the lines, the clearness of the lights, 
 the richness of the transfer from copper to 
 paper — these things, in their proper combina- 
 tion, are only possible while the plate 
 remains flawless. And though impressions , 
 from Meryon's plates must now always be rare, 
 the plates were not destroyed too soon. As it 
 is, the prints differ extremely in quality. 
 
MiRYON. 193 
 
 Too many bad ones remain for the unwary. 
 
 The British Museum and two or three 
 private collectors are in possession of ex- 
 amples of his entire work. Isolated pieces, 
 or a few carefully gathered, are to be seen 
 more frequently among the lovers of art. 
 Pieces here and there occur at sales ; here 
 and there in the portfolios of dealers. But 
 for the public to be properly acquainted with 
 them as a series, as a whole, as the work of 
 a life, there is needed an exhibition of them in 
 their choicest states and best impressions, and 
 this is an exhibition which a society such as 
 the Burlington Pine Arts Club would do itself 
 much honour by undertaking.* 
 
 For, though a single piece may show well 
 enough both manual skill and a sense of beauty 
 which shall be a surprise to the stranger, it is 
 only by a knowledge of the whole, or at all 
 events of several pieces carefully gathered, 
 that the personal sentiment can be known and 
 valued — that it can be felt how much more is 
 
 * The context obliges these lines to stand as they were first writlen 
 (in The Nineteenth Century), though, since then, the Exhibition haa 
 fortunately taken place. 
 
 O 
 
194 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 in the artist's thought and work than the mere 
 stones of the building he is recording, the 
 mere water whose steady flow under dark 
 bridges he has painted, so to say, as no one 
 else; how he is possessed of a sense of the 
 restless, eager, almost tragical activity of the 
 existence around him ; how the character, the 
 life, the mysteries, the fortunes of Paris — the 
 Paris unfrequented of the tourist and the 
 prosperous — are depicted on his plates. 
 
 For what one print suggests, another print 
 confirms. The Rue des Mauvais Garfons, with 
 its gaunt house lines, its barred windows, its 
 darkly shadowed portal, and deserted ways — 
 its narrow pavement, along which two lonely 
 figures hurry, and " gather garments round 
 them, pass, nor pry" — has its companion in the 
 Morgue, where, before the tender and delicate 
 lines of the Doric building now destroyed, and 
 before the many-storied houses with windows 
 indifferent or watchful, the weird figures of 
 Meryon's pencil gaze idly or rush with terror : 
 here, a cruel crowd assembled heartless, the 
 uumoved witnesses of the terrible arrival; 
 
MiBYON. 195 
 
 there one woman in the agony of dread or 
 discovery, knowing or surmising whose is the 
 body borne with dropped and heavy head, with 
 wet limbs, from the river. 
 
 These things are conveyed with the strangest 
 and most fascinating and most impressive 
 union — Meryon's alone — of a realistic art that 
 recoils from nothing of terrible, of shabby, of 
 loathsome, provided it be actual, true, and of 
 our day, with an imaginative art — an art of 
 suggestion, almost of fantasy — that speaks to 
 the mind by symbols, by hints of profound sig* 
 nificance, yet of ever varying interpretations — 
 an art in this one sense akin to that of the 
 Melancholia and The Knight of Death. And 
 above these scenes, so depicted that the realism 
 which at first you looked for over all is arrested 
 and elevated by imagination, or the imagina- 
 tion which at first you wanted over all is dis- 
 turbed by the healthy shock of realism— above 
 these scenes, these and so many others so de- 
 picted, there broods with satisfaction Meryon's 
 Stryge— the horned and winged demon, an in- 
 carnation of all evil and disastrous things, 
 
 O 2 
 
196 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 which the Gothic imagination set among the 
 carved stones of Notre Dame, and which the 
 genius of Meryon understood and interpreted, 
 as it looked down from its lonely heights upon 
 the life of the city. Here and elsewhere 
 Meryon recorded strange things, terrible 
 things, beautiful things, but never his sense of 
 this or that object — building, church, or bridge 
 — for its own sake alone. He recorded in them 
 his imagination of Paris — his sense of various 
 fortunes and many lives. He did this with the 
 truth of fact, and the truth of poetic fiction. 
 
 The imaginative power never, except at will, 
 weakened his grasp of the actualities he wanted 
 to pourtray. I have spoken already of archi- 
 tecture, of the equal force in seizing and 
 recording the characteristics of styles various 
 or opposed, the solemnity of the Gothic cathe- 
 dral, the lightness and simplicity of the Morgue, 
 the elaborate luxuriance of the Renaissance 
 waxing weightier to the days of Louis Quatorze 
 — witness the church (St. Btienne itself) in the 
 background of the St. Etienne du Mont. But he 
 -had ■ not only the sense of the picturesque and 
 
MfiRYON. 197 
 
 the characteristic ; lie had the sense of con- 
 struction. Take the Pompe — the engine-house 
 by the river — and its scaffolding, beam crossed 
 by beam. Here his pleasure in constructive 
 work, however humble, is shown by his close 
 and careful following of the woodwork to its 
 darkest and furthest recesses. His fame would 
 be assured if it rested only on the rendering 
 of the labour of men's hands, from the fretted 
 roof of the cathedral and its stately towers 
 to the intricate timbers of the engine-house, 
 or the rough boarding quickly placed round 
 spots marked for destruction or repair.* 
 
 But while specially heedful of the streets and 
 bridges, quays and houses, amid which the 
 weird figures of his drama passed in playing 
 their part, Meryon looked with no careless 
 eyes on all of Nature that was visible in Paris 
 —on water and sky. The Pont au Change— 
 
 * Mr. Hamerton, generally warm and discriminating in his praise, 
 and one of the earliest to discern the power of Meryon, has somehow 
 blamed him for a " puerile imitation " of the grain of wood in the Rue 
 de la Tixeranderu. But Meryon erred in good company— with 
 Diirer and Lucas of Leyden. (See the St. Jerome of Diirer, and an 
 Entombment of Lucas of Leyden.) 
 
198 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 both the large original etching and the ex- 
 quisite interpretation of Mcolle's old design— 
 the Pont Neuf, the great Abside itself with its 
 foreground of Seine stream, will show us that 
 no one like Mdryon has depicted running 
 water, now shallow, now deep, never mirror- 
 like, never gathered into waves, but rippling 
 pleasantly against the angles of the bridge 
 piers, or flowing moody and sullen under its 
 darkest arches ; now in happy sunlight ; now 
 in profound and blackened shadow, suggestive 
 of the suicidal plunge and the slime of the 
 river-bed ; now again in the half-lights, in the 
 delicate semi-tones more beautiful and difficult. 
 Here, at least, there is success undisputed, 
 and in etched work -quite unequalled, save in 
 our own day once and once only by the broad 
 ripple of the Thames in Agamemnon, and save, 
 in the great days, by the tranquil waters of 
 Rembrandt, which reflect the pleasant lines of 
 house and tree in Cottage and Dutch Haybarn, 
 and of stream-side, fence,, and herbage in 
 Cottage with white Palings. 
 The great etchers have been very chary of 
 
M&RYON. 199 
 
 their treatment of skies, and Meryon, in adven- 
 turing sometimes a little further, could not 
 hope to fare better than they. He would only 
 have copied Rembrandt had he left, for the 
 most part, his skies a blank ; the master found 
 that that simple proceeding, if properly com- 
 bined with a subtle toning of the landscape, 
 best suggested the open sky of open country — 
 the stillness and the spaciousness he loved. 
 Therefore he departed from it scarcely more 
 than twice : once in the rain-storm of the Three 
 Trees ; once in depicting in a rare small land- 
 scape the limited light of dawn. 
 
 But Meryon' s skies were not the skies of 
 open country ; no vast spaces of unbroken 
 air, of light uncrossed by shadows, but mostly 
 fragments of sky seen from between towering 
 street-lines — the grey, obscured, and lower 
 sky of cities ; now and again, as in the Abside, 
 larger tracts, here charged with brooding 
 clouds, with birds flying low — the " solemn, 
 admonishing skies" of a mind constant to its 
 own imaginations. In the Abside, with its 
 rolling cloud, his sky is at its best ; so it is in 
 
200 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the etching of the Pont au Change vers 1784 
 (after Nicolle), and in the clouded air of the 
 Pont Neuf. But elsewhere his lines are now and 
 then hard ; his dots now and then mechanical in 
 effect, though never actually without meaning. 
 He saw skies as a poetical artist is bound to 
 see them, but his hand, in rendering them, 
 was not always of equal sureness. The con- 
 ditions of etching — the employment of pure 
 lines — fettered him, and what if he did fail 
 sometimes, where Claude himself, the artist of 
 the sunset, failed often ! 
 
 But indeed his distant skies are often of 
 marvellous poetry, and the atmosphere between 
 us and those furthest skies is of singular 
 fidelity. Meryon felt the air, now keen and 
 clear, now misty; now, in the pleasantest 
 places of brilliant Paris, sunny as Yan der 
 Heyden's or Do Hooch's; now thick and 
 blackish grey, as it hangs sluggishly under damp 
 dark arch or over the slime of the banks of 
 the river. 
 
 Lastly, the figures of Meryon. Here, as no- 
 where else, reality and fantasy were allowed to 
 
M&RYON. 201 
 
 join. They are small always — little passing 
 masses of light, shade, and movement, to re- 
 lieve, to indicate, to suggest. They make no 
 claim to accuracy of draughtmanship. But they 
 are always interesting, fascinating, and alive, 
 always in strange accord with the dominant note 
 of the subject, whether they are found in grace 
 of quietness or energy of action. Thus the tall 
 and tranquil elegance of the standing figure 
 in the Abside, almost sculpturesque in the sim- 
 plicity of its grace, like that of the figure 
 leaning against the doorway in the Rue de la 
 Tixeranderie, fits the sentiment no less than it 
 suits the composition, and is Meryon's and no 
 others. Under the arch of Le Pont Notre- 
 Dame, a woman's figure, standing, brooding 
 nobly, is set well against the weird activity 
 of the lithe figure slung in the rope. It is 
 a page out of Eugene Sue and the Mysteries 
 of Paris. Under the shadow of the College of 
 Montaigu, now no more, sisters of charity hie 
 on their errand ; on the church steps a beggar 
 will not be denied. Before the Morgue there 
 gather, as I have said already, its eager 
 
202 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 seekers and its cruel crowd — a dramatic scene, 
 most passionately emphasized. Somewhere else, 
 there is a boat on dark water, with strange signi- 
 ficant dredging. And below the place where 
 the sunlight Meryon painted so well, strikes 
 on the turrets of the Pont Neuf, figures point 
 with eager gesture to the shadowed and 
 blackened water, and in the boat a group of 
 three form or suggest, like the willows in 
 Childe Roland, " a suicidal throng." For no 
 ghost would have been needed to beckon 
 Meryon to " more removed ground," for such 
 "impartment" as it might desire, "to him 
 alone." Spirits spoke to him, only too well, in 
 every street of Paris. The stones were alive. 
 And in every building of beauty or age, at 
 every dark street corner, in every bridge that 
 spanned the breadth of Seine, in every aspect 
 of wandering water or passing sky, there was 
 something to recall to him the fortunes of the 
 solitary, of the disappointed, of the desperate, 
 of the poor. His sense of these strange 
 fortunes — of their mystery and tragedy — he has 
 woven inseparably into the fabric of his work. 
 
BURNE JONES. 
 
BURNE JONES. 
 
 Or Mr. Burne Jones and Mr. Albert Moore, 
 it has been said that the one is chiefly 
 careful to present a soul and the other to pre- 
 sent a body. But as regards Mr. Albert Moore, 
 that is hardly a fair statement of the case. A 
 fairer one, though yet one obviously very 
 rough, would be that Mr. Jones is often 
 careful to present the soul in an unhealthy 
 body, and Mr. Moore always in a healthy. The 
 healthy mind in healthy body is indeed an ideal 
 always before Mr. Moore — a troubled mind in 
 worn and weary vesture of the flesh is that 
 with which we are most familiar through the 
 
206 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 art of Mr. Burne Jones. An admirable 
 novelist, full of curious thought expressed in 
 ways of careful quaintness, has lately put forth 
 the theory that the type and the ideal of 
 human beauty are about to change ; certainly 
 for men, he says, and probably for women, for 
 he reckons, I think, that the stress of modern 
 life is so much incompatible with the ideal of 
 repose and of faultlessness, that a beauty 
 wholly of expression — wholly of record of past 
 experience, sorrow, and passion — must needs, 
 and very soon, bear the palm from a beauty of 
 quietude, vigour, and peace. The fancy is 
 ingenious ; and did it express the truth, Mr. 
 Burne Jones might be immediately acclaimed 
 as the master in painting that newer type, the 
 beauty of the Future— a beauty, by-the-bye, of 
 which at all events we should have had a fore- 
 taste in the weary subtlety of Leonardo's 
 women. If it were true, Mr. Burne Jones's 
 conscious recession into the past would be an 
 unconscious advance into the future. If it 
 were true, the work of Mr. Albert Moore would 
 have lost half its raison d'etre: the healthy 
 
BURNE JONES. 207 
 
 beauty he has sought and found would appeal 
 to us no more. 
 
 But then, those of us who recognise as a fault 
 and not as a virtue that choice, by Mr. Burne 
 Jones of a strange and weary type— those of 
 us who would wish that his women could be 
 persuaded to take life a little less hardly, to 
 have some joy, were it only in the leaves and 
 fruits and flowers which the painter has 
 cast so lovingly around them — those of us 
 who bewail the choice, have at least to be 
 careful that we do not put aside from us, 
 without some long examination, work which 
 has impressed, and very strongly, some minds 
 not drawn to it only by a love of the archaic, a 
 devotion to the past. If we think we recognise 
 a mistake, and in the face of much belauding, 
 want to have the faithful boldness to con- 
 demn it, we must be careful that in per- 
 ceiving the failure we do not fail to profit 
 by an unusual success. Mr. Burne Jones 
 has been over-praised : his faults and his 
 deficiencies, and they are bound to be many, 
 have been exalted into virtues. Whatever 
 
208 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 is worst and least worthy in him has chimed in 
 with whatever is worst and least worthy in the 
 modern literature of a clique, and the modern 
 taste of a clique. With the feebler imitators 
 of that literature, with the more slavish fol- 
 lowers of that taste, a healthy love of actual 
 things is held to be nothing but vulgar. For 
 that literature and for that taste — save as 
 regards two or three of the masters, who are 
 too strong, after all, to rest for ever in the 
 washy dreamland of their pupils — beauty is 
 chiefly of the fourteenth century, and never of 
 England. In the London of to-day, with its 
 thousand vivid interests for poet and artist, 
 they must needs shake the dust from off their 
 feet, and they refuse the boon of the nineteenth 
 century. They revel in the archaism, of Mr. 
 Burne Jones, though how far they really ap- 
 preciate his qualities — his qualities of invention, 
 his qualities of colour, the things that are his 
 merits and not the things that are his faults 
 — who can say ? Knowing how pale is their 
 interest in the art of the actual, how scornful 
 their rejection of its finest expressions— in 
 
BURNE JONES. 209 
 
 England from Hogarth to Dickens, in Holland 
 from Eembrandt to Jan Steen — who can 
 say? 
 
 But we must not be repelled from Mr. 
 Burne Jones by the occasional hysterics 
 of advocacy so unfortunate. This or that 
 academic woman faints with rapture in the 
 public journals — and we would willingly pass 
 by without regarding. But that we must 
 not do. For the art of Mr. Burne Jones is 
 that of a most serious and richly endowed 
 artist, who has gone on his way through years 
 of neglect before he came upon these years of 
 somewhat too loudly trumpeted fame ; and we 
 need not be the Philistines to reject his gifts, 
 even though we do not aspire to be numbered 
 with those children of light for whom his gifts 
 are without drawback. In some sense it is 
 to his disadvantage that he has set himself 
 so especially to the art of symbolism, and 
 the realisation of classic or . mediaeval story. 
 It has necessarily lost him some admirers ; it 
 has made him, to many, more difficult of re- 
 ception. On old themes, it was asked, what 
 
210 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 had lie to say ? But, on the other hand, it is 
 by his resolute adherence to many a theme 
 which weaker and more conventional treatment 
 than his had made appear outworn and hence- 
 forth barren that he has shown so conclusively 
 his own inventiveness — one of the great gifts 
 which have prevented him from poorly imita- 
 ting an elder art while being at the same time 
 no doubt a follower of it. Mr. Burne Jones, 
 almost alone among the painters of our day, 
 breathes a fresh life into these old fables, so 
 that in their new form they may have interest 
 for us, and suggestions of reality — nay, even 
 of intensity. The vividness, if the comparison 
 may be pardoned, which lovers of the theatre 
 find, or look to find, in the best stage repre- 
 sentations — a vividness so much beyond any 
 that is at the command of the best descriptive 
 literature — is found at times in Mr. Burne 
 Jones, so that his presentation of the naivete, 
 the happy tenderness, the joyous curiosity of 
 Galatea may be discovered to have some 
 charm not altogether different from Galatea's 
 charm when Mrs. Kendal embodied her. Both 
 
BURNE JONES, 21 1 
 
 artists — he of the studio and she of the 
 theatre — have entered in imagination into 
 the mythical creation, have impressed upon 
 it their own individuality; though a felici- 
 tous and unlearned instinct, prompted, I sup- 
 pose, Mrs. Kendal, while the more assured 
 sympathy of long familiarity with classic story 
 inspired Mr. Burne Jones. 
 
 The inventiveness of Mr. Burne Jones shows 
 itself in fullness of thought. No greater mis- 
 take can be committed than that of confusing 
 the aim of his work with such as is barrenly 
 " decorative." Some of the themes he has 
 chosen — the single symbolical figures, for 
 example — tempt to that aim. Some of these 
 themes, some of these figures, begin with 
 thought and end in decoration, in the hands of 
 those followers who are careful to follow his 
 subject and his style, but are without his spon- 
 taneous invention. But his own work is scarcely 
 ever merely decorative — often not decorative 
 at all, in that narrow sense of which we speak. 
 Where it fails, it fails in realising quite another 
 aim. His Day for instance — the haggard and ill- 
 
 p 2 
 
212 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 fed youth exhibited at the Grosvenor, shivering 
 , and nude — we do not suppose but that a painter 
 very capable of beautiful lines could have 
 given us, had that been his aim, a figure more 
 satisfying to our sense of form. His Spring, 
 again, and Summer — so far less successful than 
 Autumn — they fail in many ways, we may hold, 
 but at least there was thought in them, though 
 mistaken thought — invention, though it may be 
 invention misapplied. 
 
 But it is always a nice question in dealing 
 with any art — of painting or literature, or 
 sculpture or the stage — where invention or 
 imagination stands alone — where it is the 
 cunning application of that which has been 
 keenly observed. Eeally it is of course the 
 work of imagination to turn observation to 
 account ; and the result of the process is what 
 we call invention. Now, in the art of paint- 
 ing — in the art of pictorial design, whether 
 with brush or pencil or the tool of the en- 
 graver — the invention is displayed first in the 
 general grouping of the figures of the scene, 
 if general grouping there be; then by the 
 
BURNE JONES. 213 
 
 gesture and attitude of each particular figure ; 
 lastly, and very often chiefly, by the expres- 
 sion pourtrayed in the faces of the personages 
 who act the drama we are called upon to see. 
 Now Mr. Burne Jones is sometimes weakest, 
 or has often been weakest, in the first. 
 Balance and symmetry of arrangement have 
 often been lacking to his compositions of 
 several figures. The perfect planning out of 
 the given space of canvas or paper which 
 Adrian van Ostade accomplished as absolutely 
 as the glass-workers of Holland accomplished 
 the same task in the patterning of all the 
 happy irregularity of their window-panes — the 
 perfect planning out of the given space which 
 Turner first of all carried into the art of land- 
 scape — Mr. Burne Jones has failed to achieve, 
 has often failed even to approach. He has 
 looked most hardly and studiously, it would 
 appear, at the art of artists who were without 
 this gift, and a crudity and angularity of 
 composition which were very common in the 
 earlier artists of Italy are not absent by any 
 means from the designs of Mr. Jones. To 
 
214 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 convince ourselves of it we do not need to go 
 back to the more remote of Mr. Jones's works, 
 to designs executed at a time when he was still 
 very much, and in many ways, a learner. We 
 have only to stand before two of the most admir- 
 able examples of his art — the Laus Veneris and the 
 Chant d' Amour of one year's Grosvenor Grallery 
 ■ — to see the point for ourselves. And yet we 
 do well to note that in a large design for one 
 of a series of The Sleeping Beauty, this fault in 
 any mature art, this error which could be per- 
 mitted to the beginning, but could not be per- 
 mitted to the end, is in a fair way to be 
 overcome. In The Sleeping Beauty, and in much 
 besides, there is harmony and rhythm of 
 arrangement — between the various figures a 
 most gracious accord. The sense of this accord 
 cannot be lacking to Mr. Burne Jones, and an 
 artist of such diligent and unremitting applica- 
 tion should finish by always, and not occasion- 
 ally, securing it. 
 
 In the gesture and attitude of each particular 
 figure Mr. Burne Jones is habitually happy, 
 for in the first place the gesture is expressive 
 
BURNE JONES. 215 
 
 of such story as there may be to tell, and in 
 the second the attitude is often chosen with a 
 sense of the beauty of line. But this sense of 
 the beauty of line, and especially of the lines 
 of the figure in repose rather than in action, 
 is not that in which the artist is strongest. 
 Here again his studies of primitive schools, 
 his first sympathies with the beginnings of 
 art, have probably influenced him even more 
 than he is likely to suspect. 
 
 But it is when we come to our last point 
 among the three which we have needed to 
 take as those in which invention is chiefly 
 shown in the arts of design — it is when we 
 come to the expression of the face, that is, 
 more than anything else, the expression of the 
 soul, that Mr. Burne Jones is strong with a 
 strength in which I sometimes doubt if he is any- 
 where rivalled. But it is not in variety that he 
 is strong — it is in intensity and subtlety. It is 
 true that subtlety implies variety in some 
 sense, but the variety is only within limited 
 range ; the differences are delicate and not 
 extreme. Sympathy with joyous moods and 
 
216 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 cheery hours is wanting to this artistic or- 
 ganisation, as it shows itself on his can- 
 vas. The days he wots of are days of 
 labour and sorrow — labour only the more em- 
 bittered, and sorrow only waxing more 
 sorrowful, by the vision of fleeting beauty and 
 by yearnings not to be gratified because they 
 are insatiable. Thus the expression on the 
 faces of his design is limited in kind and not 
 in extent, and it is when he endeavours to 
 pass beyond the limits which his temperament 
 or the art he has studied has set him that he 
 falls into failure. Thus nothing can be less 
 representative of happy seasons of flower and 
 fruit than the saddened faces posed as 
 Spring and Summer at the Grosvenor Gallery. 
 Under one of these women there are written 
 the lines 
 
 " Prithee take it Dot amiss, 
 If I weary thee with bliss.'' 
 
 Such a woman might conceivably be able to 
 weary us with anything else in the world ; but 
 with " bliss " — never ! 
 Perhaps Mr. Burne Jones has reached his 
 
BUBNE JONES. 217 
 
 highest point of facial expression in designs 
 not yet exhibited at public exhibitions ; but 
 which, through the excellent custom he has 
 begun in England, are accessible to all in his 
 studio. There is a design from the beginning 
 of the Romance of the Rose, where the Pilgrim 
 arrives weary in the Garden of Idleness, Now 
 here, as often besides, the expression is con- 
 summate : the expression of the maiden and 
 her accordant gesture ; the expression of the 
 saddened wanderer whom she bids to enter 
 in. Is it solicitation or reluctance, is it a 
 gentle fear or a floating reverie ?— Mr. Burne 
 Jones can convey it with delicate skill. The 
 Pan and Psyche, of the G-rosvenor Gallery, some 
 will deem to be not less a triumph in facial 
 expression. But here it seems to me the 
 whole of these two bodies are consummately 
 expressive. Expression is in the gesture even 
 more than in the face : tenderness on the one 
 part, and on the other a timidity beginning to 
 be trustful. In a brown landscape of rocky 
 valley, passed through by a stream whose way 
 is bordered with flowers, and with flowers on 
 
218 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the margin of many a pool, are placed the two 
 figures — Psyche, whom the " kind river," 
 " with all gentle care," as William Morris has 
 it, " has cast ashore within a meadow fair," 
 and Pan, the brown river god, haunter -and 
 lonely dweller in places beautiful yet desolate, 
 the brown god bending tenderly over the 
 rescued being still wan and dazed with water 
 — bending tenderly, do I say ? — bending 
 chivalrously too, if a word of mediasvalism 
 is appropriate to antiquity. The beauty here, 
 the charm here, and the expressiveness here 
 are beauty, charm, and expressiveness of figure 
 as well as of face, and at the bottom of the 
 invention that has secured these there must 
 have been that sensitiveness of observation and 
 insight — a thing after all of artistic feeling 
 more than a thing of intellect — which we may 
 hold to be among the most peculiar, and pro- 
 bably the most precious, of Mr. Burne Jones's 
 gifts. It is not so much keenness of perception 
 as fineness of f eeling, delicacy of imagination — a 
 poetic sense that refines the thing it works upon. 
 And having said and felt so much of the 
 
BURNE JONES. 219 
 
 rare loveliness and the high charm of much of 
 Mr. Jones's design, of much of his imagina- 
 tion, perhaps I shall have earned the right 
 to protest against and to bewail the promin- 
 ence of the unhealthy type with which his work 
 has familiarised us. Laus Veneris — with all its 
 great qualities — is an uncomfortable picture, so 
 wan and death-like, so stricken with disease 
 of the soul, so eaten up and gnawed away with 
 disappointment and desire, is that sad Queen 
 of Love It is not enough to say to us that 
 the subject demanded the discomfort. That can 
 hardly be pleaded even in extenuation, as long 
 as their remain those terrible witnesses of Mr. 
 Burne Jones's deliberate, though it may be 
 early, choice, the miserable Bay, the sickly 
 Spring, and the over-wearied Summer. The 
 type is to many an offensive, to most a dis- 
 agreeable one, and the Yenus is of that type 
 the most disagreeable, the most offensive 
 example. The very body is unpleasant 
 and uncomely; the soul which it reveals 
 is ghastly. The soul has known strange tor- 
 tures : the body has writhed with every 
 
220 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 impulse of sickness instead of health; and, 
 therefore, body and soul commend themselves 
 to those for whom health is vulgar and happi- 
 ness stupidity. And whatever there may be 
 of beauty and distinction in that type in our 
 own world which has suggested the type we 
 exclaim against in- the world of Mr. Burne 
 Jones, is marred and lost by the exaggeration 
 of the artist. The very beauty of the short 
 upper lip and many-curved mouth becomes 
 deformity when there is nothing but the upper 
 lip proper, lifted and swollen, between the teeth 
 and the nose, and when the mouth has more 
 than the violin's suddenness of curve and 
 sharpness of returned curve. And the jaw, 
 with 
 
 " Pure wide curve from ear to chin," 
 
 as Mr. Dante Rossetti sings so well of one of 
 his beauties — and with such an artist's note — 
 that pleasant line also is defaced by the mon- 
 strous thinness of the cheek and the depths 
 of its hollows. And the hands, bony, wasted, 
 almost nerveless — hands galvanised into move- 
 
BURNE JONES. 221 
 
 ment by temporary excitement, but not hands 
 with the steady and assured and supple motion 
 of health. And then the hips, narrow and 
 straight— the exaggeration of a beauty which 
 Greek art recognised — a beauty in which the 
 one sex was not so very far removed from the 
 other. Here they are together and identical. 
 And then the length of leg from hip to knee; 
 Vivien of one year had it, and Venus of another. 
 Is it a mistake in choice or a mistake in 
 drawing ? 
 
 But in the minor personages of Mr. Jones's 
 design, and notably in one important figure, 
 the quite exquisite Psyche — and again, to 
 do him, if that may be, no injustice, in 
 more than one principal work now in his 
 studio — the artist has reverted to health, 
 has deviated, as his maligners might say, 
 into vigour. The figure to the spectator's 
 left in the Laus Veneris— the figure seen in 
 profile — has a face of freshness and serene 
 gravity. Very beautiful is the indication of 
 beauty in the turned-away head and lost out- 
 lines of the orange-capped girl with blue robe, 
 
222 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 with a young and fresh white hand on the 
 page of the illuminated book in the same picture. 
 Psyche is of irreproachable loveliness. Autumn 
 is not inevitably barren. Certain cheery dam- 
 sels, bare-footed and slim, twinkle down the 
 " Grolden Stairs." And here and there chiefly 
 in backgrounds of Mr. Burne Jones's pictures, 
 one has glimpses into worlds in which un- 
 starved, unwasted maidens pass with agile 
 step, and pleasantly rounded figures dance to 
 happy tunes. 
 
 Faulty too often in composition and draughts- 
 manship—mistaken, as we hold, too often in the 
 selected type — Mr. Jones fails rarely in the ex- 
 ecution of his scheme of colour. But that scheme 
 is most frequently suggested by the art of the 
 Florentine, and not by the art of the Venetian : 
 that is, it is suggested most frequently by 
 sympathy with a school which in this respect 
 did hardly more than prepare the way for the 
 Venetians' triumph. Having the failings— the 
 deficiencies, say rather — of that school in 
 colour, Mr. Burne Jones has also its virtues. 
 In the presentation of pure colour, bright and 
 
BVBNE JONES. 223 
 
 clear without gaudiness— large spaces of pure 
 blues, pure reds hardly broken by shadows — 
 Mr. Burne Jones, in the garments, say, of 
 the figures in Laus Veneris is successfully 
 Florentine. But here and there in his later 
 work, and especially in the Pan and Psyche 
 and in the Chant a" Amour, his scheme has 
 been very different : the interfused, the blended, 
 the shadowed colours give depth, richness, 
 and distance : and passing as it were at a 
 bound from the Florentine practice, he 
 touches the consummate triumph of colour and 
 tone which we associate with the school of 
 Giorgione. The music of colour is deep — its 
 harmonies rich and manifold — in the Pan 
 and Pysche and the Chant d 'Amour, and 
 nothing but some vivid sympathy with the 
 supreme art of Yenice could have given us 
 these works. 
 
 But where Mr. Jones is most of all sensitive 
 to beauty and harmony of colour — and where 
 his eye kindles most to an exquisite vision of 
 form as well as of hue — is in the drawing and 
 painting of flowers and leaves. To the love- 
 
224 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 liness of various shapes of leaves, flowers, 
 fruits, either alone or in the most happily 
 ordered or disordered combination, he is ex- 
 ceptionally alive. His very composition here 
 is at its best, for it must be something more 
 than the keenest observation that has led him 
 to place as he has placed in such faultless ar- 
 rangement the floral decoration of which he 
 gives us so much, and of which each new gift 
 is a fresh pleasure. Doubtless the unquestion- 
 ing admirers of Mr. Jones's favourite and most 
 peculiar type of woman would think we did 
 him scant justice in assigning to his flower and 
 leaf-painting almost the greatest place in his 
 art. But, after all, by that he can hardly 
 fail to be remembered, even should change in 
 taste and change in the ideal cause much of 
 his work to be forgotten. His flowers have 
 reality, yet well-nigh always without any petti- 
 ness of precision — any advertisement of his 
 elaborate labour, Nothing seems more spon- 
 taneous. And not only are they there for you 
 to pluck them, but they are there exactly where 
 your finest sense of arrangement would have 
 
BURNE JONES. 225 
 
 them to be. Remove but one of them, and 
 there would be a loss to the picture. He draws 
 them all and colours them all perfectly : the 
 rose, the iris, the tulip, the wallflower, the 
 forget-me-not, the daisy — Chaucer's flower — 
 the lawn, 
 
 " With daisies powdered o'er." 
 
 And the whole nature of the flower he has en- 
 tirely seized : its texture, its very weight ; the 
 sturdiness of the short-stemmed, strong- 
 petalled daisy and of the many-clustered forget- 
 me-not, and the fragility of roses and their light- 
 ness. There is, or was, a picture in his studio in 
 which the white-pink rose petals fall with 
 wondrous softness on the grey-green of the 
 heaving water. His harmonies of colour are 
 best in flower painting. His field of green 
 is studded with little stars of turquoise, cool 
 and refreshing, and a gladness to the eye in 
 the sober light of his landscape ; his subdued 
 foregrounds are illumined or enriched with the 
 pure and noble colours of flowers : ia the 
 Chant, d Amour the goodly reds rise to 
 
 Q 
 
226 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 orange, and fall again to golden and russet- 
 browns. If there were nothing else to like in 
 Mr. Burne Jones's work, those would still be 
 mistaken indeed who failed to see in these 
 things such beauty and power as have seldom 
 before been manifested. 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 
 
 From much contemporary work, which is 
 apt to be hopelessly melancholy when it is not 
 commonplace, it is a pleasure and refreshment 
 to turn to the works of Mr. Albert Moore — 
 to the figures in which he has realized his high 
 ideal of gracious quietude and noble vigour. 
 Mr. Albert Moore paints neither incidents 
 nor allegories ; he limits himself very much 
 to the realization of perfectly balanced form 
 and exquisitely ordered colour. He has one sub- 
 ject to speak accurately, and that is the realiza- 
 tion of these in some partly fresh, some partly 
 varied combination. Therefore a story to be 
 understood and a conscious moral, underlying 
 
230 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 it, are the last things we ought to look for in his 
 work. It is contented with the perfect realiza- 
 tion of decorative beauty of form and hue, but 
 the model's own face — exalted, it may be, in the 
 artist's work — here bears upon it no signs of a 
 hateful, or weary, or over-blissful past; its 
 best moral is in its splendid calm and restful 
 strength : " those Greek qualities of goodness 
 and beauty" of which, in our contemporary 
 literature, the Balaustion of Mr. Browning is 
 the finest expression. 
 
 The subject of Mr. Albert Moore's art be- 
 comes more and more simplified. Of old he 
 painted groups : figures blocked out like 
 sketches of sculpture, and lightly tinted with 
 colours indicative rather than imitative. He has 
 kept to the light key of colour which he 
 adopted, as far as I know, from the begin- 
 ning, and the harmonies he has constructed 
 are gladsome as well as subtle. And in the 
 matters of harmony and completion — the bring- 
 ing the work to be accomplished precisely up 
 to the aim with which it was begun— he has 
 made a very noteworthy advance. Hardly in 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 231 
 
 this direction is it possible for him to go any 
 further. But his subject, or what is generally 
 accepted as subject, he has curtailed. It is 
 several years since he has given us any such 
 combination and contrast of figures — these in 
 action, those in rest — as were presented in The 
 Quartett, the " painter's tribute to the art of 
 music :" the musicians with the stringed in- 
 struments, and the looking girls, and the one 
 listening woman, the girls concerned with the 
 men, and^; the woman with the music. Since 
 then, and since one other such many-figured 
 picture, there have been groups of two : two 
 loungers, perhaps, on a sofa, every line in 
 each figure and each drapery a studied addi- 
 tion of harmony and grace. But now we have 
 single figures wholly, as of old we had them 
 frequently — single figures in which some ac- 
 cessories, of lovely and chosen form, play 
 their part, and the part not a small one, in 
 completing the composition. And perhaps it 
 is a more difficult achievement to have completed 
 a composition with the lines of accessory ob- 
 jects, however fortunate and fair, than with 
 
232 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the lines of some second or third figure. To 
 draw a single figure as a study is one thing : 
 to make with it a composition is quite another. 
 But whatever may be the difficulties of the 
 earlier or later task, it would be well, for 
 change's sake, if Mr. Moore would set himself 
 now and again to recall the particular beauties 
 of The Qjiartett and the work? akin to it. 
 
 But whether in the presentation of group 
 or of single figure, he stands very much alone 
 in English art ; as much by reason of the order 
 of beauty of which he has made himself the 
 exponent, as by his frank devotion to the ex- 
 pression of that beauty and of little besides. 
 Many artists, at least of the Italian Renais- 
 sance, and one or two more recent in England 
 and France, were as little occupied as Mr. 
 Moore with the story they professed to relate 
 on canvas or wall, and their art found only the 
 least of its attractions in the incident with 
 which they ostensibly dealt. The figures of 
 Raphael, the finer work of Giulio Romano, 
 the most selected work, in the last century, 
 pf Flaxman, and in our own, of Ingres, were 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 
 
 l 33 
 
 accepted almost by the world — at all events 
 commend themselves to us — for their pure 
 beauties of chosen form. Much of the great 
 art of the past has found its noblest and most 
 lasting charm in the ways in which it has con- 
 veyed to us the energy of action and the grace 
 of rest, the subtlest combinations and concords 
 of line and modulations of hue. For the pre- 
 sentation of these things, often the story told 
 with more or less precision, or hinted at with 
 more or less vagueness, has served as an 
 excuse. Albert Moore has dispensed with 
 the excuse. But the question posed so 
 often before his lovely figures, his hanging 
 draperies, his tender hues and passages of 
 light — "What is it all about?" — has no more 
 business to be asked than before the Lucretia 
 of Raphael or the Source of Ingres. 
 
 But as far as regards the women of his 
 work, the invention is wholly his own; the 
 type and its treatment are new in painting, 
 and the introduction of that type, whether 
 derived from life or from Greek sculpture, or, 
 as is more probable, from both, is, in days of 
 
234 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 the triumph of sickly ecstasy, a thing to be 
 thankful for. And as the women of Mr. 
 Moore's work are but rarely engaged in any 
 pursuits which stamp them as wholly of this 
 world — as it never occurs to any one to wish 
 to fix their rank in life or to inquire into their 
 human relationships — so Mr. Moore, in part 
 by lines and form, in part by his intentional 
 incompleteness of execution in painting, sug- 
 gests, though it may be but remotely, the art 
 of sculpture. His women are not mothers and 
 wives ; they come fresh upon the world, like 
 Galatea when Pygmalion had wrought his last 
 touch. A little of sculpture — vivified sculpture 
 — is in them to the end. Bare-footed or san- 
 delled, thinly draped, shifting noiselessly to 
 and fro on cool paved floors, lifting a battle- 
 dore, it may be, very graciously, but never to 
 meet a shuttle-cock ; playing with beads or a 
 straw-coloured fan, and here and there, at 
 happy points, their figures a-gleam with topaz 
 or turquoise, which repeats with a soft bril- 
 liance and concentrating emphasis some pre- 
 dominating light or hue on hair or raiment — 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 235 
 
 these are not so much portraits or realities as 
 ideal forms under ideal conditions, towards 
 which it is good to strive, and a refinement of 
 the taste to come near. 
 
 But though for decorative, for pictorial 
 purposes, it has pleased Mr. Moore to surround 
 these ideal beings with the fair objects of a 
 fashionable aesthetic paradise, and to represent 
 them as engaged only, and in the most 
 leisurely of ways, in trivial occupations, there 
 is, it must be well understood — or we have thus 
 far looked at them but vainly — nothing of trivi- 
 ality in the character indicated. The head is 
 splendidly modelled, Greek in its union of 
 various excellences ; broad -browed, calm-eyed, 
 happy-mouthed, strength and blamelessness 
 in every line and glance. If these minds have 
 any history, it is of no petty or jealous or evil 
 thought; if these bodies bear any record, it 
 is of healthy life, with no modern conscious- 
 ness of its own perfection : they are as those 
 that have wrestled for mastery in Greek games 
 and have freshened in liberal air. 
 
 j n jgys — a year in which he was fertile 
 
236 STUDIES IN ENGLISH AST. 
 
 — Mr. Moore exhibited three of these single 
 figures : two at the Grosvenor Gallery, and 
 one at the Academy, and their beauties — so 
 independent of incident or story — so wholly 
 matters of expression, line, and hue — are very 
 little fitted for description, but much repay to 
 be seen. More than most they have the " cela" 
 -presque inexprimable, qui est dans un objet d'art. 
 You cannot translate into words the charm 
 of the type nor the perfection of its realiza- 
 tion. The more important of the two pictures 
 which was at the Grosvenor Gallery is of a figure 
 on a larger scale than Mr. Moore is accus- 
 tomed to adopt, and perhaps in this there is less 
 than elsewhere of the obvious absence of any 
 intention to represent an actual person in the 
 ways of actual life. The light from above, 
 the clear and yet soft light of this artist's 
 usual choice, falls here on a figure, it may be 
 less abstract and statuesque than often before, 
 a figure with a happy brilliance in the cool 
 grey eyes, the face a little flushed, and lithe 
 movement in the long throat ; the head raised, 
 and one hand poised on hip. The union of 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 237 
 
 dignity and freedom in the gesture is that 
 chosen only by an artist alive to the beauty 
 of noble and agile movement, and careless of 
 all petty prettinesses. The large grace of its 
 supple lines, and the harmonies of light and 
 delicate tints, secure for the work its due suc- 
 cess in decorative art. The nobility and 
 distinction of the type and the expression raise 
 it, as Mr. Moore's work is wont to be raised, 
 above the purely decorative, while here in the 
 realization of texture of fabrics and stones and 
 glass — the hanging raiment, the figured cur- 
 tain, the many-patterned rugs of Eastern 
 design — the painter submitted himself more 
 completely than before to the conditions 
 of imitative painting. But its absolute har- 
 mony of tints pale or bright — never dark, 
 never low-toned — and so reaching effects of 
 pleasantness from which the dark and low 
 tones so precious in art are necessarily shut 
 off— its absolute harmony of light and cheery 
 tinting, is what, after all, you most re- 
 member. You remember an orange head- 
 gear — turban, fez, or cap — which takes the 
 
238 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 colour out of the corn-coloured hair over which 
 it fits and presses closely : the upturned face, 
 soft rose-colour, seen aslant, in almost pro- 
 file ; a greenish yellow robe, over which trails 
 a many-folded fabric, white and thin ; orange 
 brightening again the rugs of the marble 
 floor ; and, behind the figure, the glass vase, 
 clear and very large, with the lovely stems and 
 the white blossoms of flowers ; and over all 
 a thin clear air and sunshiny light. The 
 second figure which was in the Gros- 
 venor, is an exquisitely artful arrange- 
 ment of yellowish greens, with a bit of 
 reddened yellow in the woman's round fan 
 held high above the shoulder; the robe the 
 darker, the hanging draperies that cover it 
 the lighter, and the flesh colour of arm and 
 hand a purplish grey in shadow against a 
 greyish-white background. This purplish-grey, 
 or greyish-purple, of flesh colour, which Mr. 
 Moore adopts — and which, if slightly conven- 
 tional, if not always imitative of the actual 
 flesh, is at least all that his scheme demands, 
 and far better than those commoner conven- 
 
ALBERT MOORE. 239 
 
 tionalities of flesh-painting which consist in 
 the production of bloodless whity-pinks to do 
 duty for the warmth and richness of the flesh 
 of healthy life — this purplish-grey or greyish- 
 purple was made in Mr. Moore's third 
 picture {Garnets at the Royal Academy) the 
 key-note of colour. The garnets are to har- 
 monise, and they harmonise perfectly, with 
 the painter's indication of flesh-colour, and 
 that artistic harmony is prolonged and en- 
 larged by a carnation thrown at the feet of the 
 figure. Garnets is mainly a study of mellow tints 
 of garnet and grey, on flesh in light and flesh 
 in shadow ; but the pleasant concord or gentle 
 oppositions of these tints are displayed, as 
 always in the work of Mr. Moore, in designs 
 of selected form, in figures faint yet firm, with 
 the free beauty of unblemished youth and noble 
 
 quietude. 
 
 Albert Moore may often be judged, and not 
 unfairly, by the pictures of a single year. 
 That is. partly because he deals so little with 
 subjects, is concerned so little with varying 
 dramatic interest— it is not within the scheme 
 
240 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 of his art to follow every curve and hue of the 
 real figure with accurately imitative brush. 
 Master of the figure's essential beauties of 
 robustness, grace and glow, he abandons, so 
 to speak, its accidents — the little realisms of 
 portraiture, which is necessarily concerned 
 with the individual wholly, and with the type 
 not at all. Albert Moore is constant to the 
 type, of his own finding — of his own refining 
 on. 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 To have chosen two living painters, and 
 these by no means the most widely liked, as 
 fit to be discussed along . with those whose 
 rank is generally uncontested since their death, 
 implies no forgetfulness of the art of Jiving 
 brethren of quite different aim — of aim more 
 easily sympathised with and effort more easily 
 understood. Of course we value the pictorial 
 art that finds its theme with the theme of 
 contemporary fiction — in the occasional or 
 common incidents of English life. Such art, 
 amongst its other virtues, may have the 
 virtue of history, and may be placed 
 in the end not a jot below that which con- 
 cerns itself chiefly with beauty for beauty's 
 sake, or that which, reverting to remote 
 
242 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART 
 
 forms, is busy with an ancient message. 
 But the art less readily popular is perhaps 
 what justifies the best some effort to analyze 
 it; and to insist on its claims in a book which 
 tries to deal also with such art as Cruikshank's 
 and David Cox's, is, at all events, to preach 
 somewhat practically the doctrine that our 
 first business in looking at pictures is to look 
 at them unfettered by devotion to a particular 
 school. Whatever many artists may be made 
 by the necessities of their practice among a 
 guild or a clique, the public at least need not 
 be primarily partisans — the public may at least 
 be eclectic. It boots us to discover not 
 whether a work of art belongs to a particular 
 class, but whether, whatever class it belongs 
 to, it is wrought perfectly, as near as may be 
 without indolence or haste. To say this is to 
 repeat a truism : only it is a truism of which 
 we need to be reminded. 
 
 Without haste indeed ! But is there never 
 to be haste — never rapid production ? Rapid 
 production in Art may come of either of 
 two causes. It may come, as in the case of 
 
EPILOGUE. . 243 
 
 almost all noble sketches — from the etchings 
 of Rembrandt to the drawings of David Cox 
 — by reason of the vividness of the impression 
 received, and the need for its instant embodi- 
 ment. This is the rapidity of the learned, 
 who can afford to be swift, having begun by 
 being sure and slow. But the other cause of 
 rapid production is the obedience to a precept 
 excellent in everything except in the arts — 
 " Make hay while the sun shines" — which 
 being translated into the language of some of 
 our painters, means, " Get into a red-brick 
 house as quickly as possible, and if you cannot 
 be great, contrive to be fashionable." Then 
 the rapid production, instead of being the 
 occasional result of happy impulse, becomes a 
 necessity, and is no longei* a choice. The 
 pecuniary need for it may give rise even 
 to this phenomenon— that the work which 
 necessity made careless and swift is erected 
 into a model, and is accepted as the expression 
 of a principle. The impatient artifice is then 
 — during its brief day of triumph or notoriety 
 —discovered to have virtues lacking to the 
 
244 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. 
 
 patient art. And the doing of the work that 
 lasts and lives is apt to be postponed to 
 the doing of the work that pleases the 
 idlest or the most affected fancy. It rests 
 with an intelligent public opinion to set itself 
 against these things. A public that knows its 
 own mind on matters of art, and can give a 
 reason for its preferences, will not be at the 
 mercy of the last profitable eccentricity, exalted 
 into a fashion. 
 
 I saw lately an ivory casket, made by a Moor 
 in Spain, in the eleventh century : the ivory 
 soft and mellow now with its eight hundred 
 years, but it was always beautiful through 
 intricate yet restful patterning — a miracle of 
 design. It served — the inscription in ancient 
 Cufic character* upon it said — to contain 
 precious spices, musk, camphor and ambergris. 
 But the writer of that inscription had some- 
 thing more to say. " Beauty" he continued, 
 with his Eastern imagery, " has cast upon it a 
 robe bright with gems. There is nothing for me so 
 admirable as the sight of it. It enables me to bear 
 with constancy the things which happen in my house." 
 
EPILOGUE. 245 
 
 What were the things, one wonders, that 
 happened in his house ? One wonders, and 
 one does not know. But looking at his casket 
 it seems pleasant to hope that there are many 
 pictures in every Eoyal Academy wrought with 
 half as sincere an art, and affording half as 
 great a consolation. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 1877— 1880. 
 
WORKS BY FREDERICK WEDMORE. 
 
 STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART. {First Series.) 
 
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 Crome, Cotman, Turner, Girtin, Dewint, Mason, Walker. 
 
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