I cannot find amongst the German painters of the eighteen century one single artist of first-rate excellence. All the national talent seems to have found expression in the sister art of music. We find Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and a host of other musical giants, but not one man of exceptional stature amongst the painters.
Raphael Mengs was undoubtedly the best. Kugler tells us that from his twelfth year he was set to draw from the finest antiques, and from the masterpieces of M. Angelo and Raffaelle. He afterward studied color from Titian, chiaroscuro from Correggio, and so on. In short, he had a most thorough and systematic art education. He was a painstaking and intelligent man, and yet, though crammed with knowledge, he failed to leave a great name. The truth appears to be that he lacked originality and self-dependence. His pictures, therefore, though almost faultless in composition and drawing, are somehow cold and unsatisfactory.
Then there is Dietrich, whose peculiar talent lay in the imitation of other masters. Rembrandt, Ostade, and many other Dutch masters were most closely imitated by this artist.
Denner, the most minute finisher that ever lived, and Sieboldt the portrait-painter, who had a smooth, highly polished manner of painting (not unlike Denner’s), pretty well exhaust the list of popular artists in Germany.
In the Netherlands, as I have already stated, the race of charming “genre” and landscape painters died out with the seventeenth century, but Van Huysum and his followers Roepel and Van Os carried the art of flower-and fruit-painting to a point which it never reached before.
Many of the Italian painters of this century were very fond of introducing festoons of flowers in their pictures, and Boucher was pretty liberal too of Pompadour roses, but these floral accessories were treated in a decorative fashion, and could not be compared to Van Huysum’s exquisitely finished and richly colored flower pieces.
To summarize what I have said about eighteenth-century painting, we find in England a very low level of dull portraiture until Reynolds revolutionized the art; historical painting altogether absent; incident painting with only one good representative (Hogarth), and landscape-painting also with only one (Richard Wilson), unless we count Crome, Cotman, and Constable as belonging to this century. It will, however, be observed, that during the latter half of the century, art was in a continued state of progress. The portraits which satisfied the public of the early Georges were no longer tolerated. Landscape art was seriously studied, and even what is called historical painting was feebly struggling into life.
In France, on the contrary, we find the art barometer falling during the century, until the fall was rudely arrested by David. Her painters were incomparably superior to ours in the early part of the century, but the all-pervading influence of the Vanloos and Bouchers demoralized fatally the whole school, and prepared the way for the great classical revival.
Art was in a woful plight in Italy, hardly any better in Germany, and dead or not yet born in other countries. So that the eighteenth century, or at least the greater part of it, may be described in meteorological language as a widespread depression. This depression has, however, long passed away, and it rests with the coming generation of painters to take care that it should not occur again. We cannot control the weather. When a telegram is received from New York announcing “a disturbance which will develop energy” (meaning in plain English that we must look out for squalls), we cannot avert the coming storm; but when we are threatened from Paris, Vienna, or Rome, with an epidemic of false or meretricious art, we can resist the temptation of following, like the sheep of Panurge, any cracked bell-wether who may happen to be in fashion. Let every young artist work hard and conscientiously, and when he has thoroughly learned the technical part of his profession and stored his mind with knowledge likely to be useful to him, let him determine to carry out his own ideas, regardless whether they happen to coincide with the prevailing craze of the day, and I will venture to prophesy that no such a collapse of art as afflicted the first half of the eighteenth century will ever occur again.