In Germany the great art-revival began between 1810 and 1820. Cornelius and Overbeck, the two founders of the modern German school of historical painting, can neither of them be included among the followers of David, and yet it is not improbable that had the French school remained as it was under Boucher and Vanloo, Germany would also have been content to go on in the vicious routine of the eighteenth century. David, therefore, though not the progenitor, may have been the indirect cause of the modern German school. Winkleman’s laborious researches, and the flood of light he threw on classical art and antiquities, had fully prepared the way for a revival; and in Cornelius, Germany found a man after her own heart. In 1825, when he was still young, he was made Director of the Academy at Munich, and commenced the gigantic series of mural paintings with which his name will always be associated. He had a great number of scholars, and his manner is more or less perceptible in all their works. It is a manner I never did like, and probably never shall. The effort made by the artist is too evident, and all the personages seem to be acting a part. This is particularly noticeable in Kaulbach’s and Piloty’s large compositions. These works were greatly admired in Germany, and are so still, but I believe their popularity is on the wane.
As for Overbeck, he never could have become the founder of a durable school. Ascetic, exclusive, and narrow in his art views, the only charm of his pictures is indissolubly connected with the personal character of the painter. His admiration for Perugino and the Umbrian school was genuine and unbounded. He abhorred Titian and loathed Correggio. With such ideas on art he may justly be called an anachronism, and it will be easily understood that however leniently and even favorably we may judge the work of an enthusiast like Overbeck, we should not be disposed to extend the same leniency to his imitators.
We will now examine what influence the great classical revival, inaugurated by David, had on British art. I think it must be allowed that this influence (if it ever existed at all) was very slight. Our artists were content to tread in the path pointed out to them by Sir J. Reynolds, and to study with more or less intelligence the old masters. Their knowledge of the human form was very imperfect, and there were at that time no large ateliers where they could acquire such knowledge. The Continent was closed to them, and they were therefore debarred from seeing the works of David, Girodet, Guérin, and Gérard. It is probable, too, that even had they been able to visit the Paris galleries occasionally, they would have been greatly disgusted; for it must be confessed that the later works of David are singularly repellent to an eye educated on Titian and Rubens.
In England, particularly during the reign of George III, there was no demand for large figure subjects. The government did nothing for historical art.
The churches were ugly square boxes with whitewashed walls, sometimes be-plastered with black or white marble commemoration tablets, but in which paintings were tabooed. Private individuals could not, of course, find room in their houses for large pictures; so, as a natural consequence, the English school was forced into another direction, and we find accordingly the best and ablest artists of this period amongst the portrait and landscape painters.
A little of old David’s precision of drawing would not have hurt some of them, but landscape art depends more on color and effect than on fine perceptions of form, and careful study of the antique is obviously unnecessary to a man whose mission it is to paint mountains and trees, storm and sunshine.
Of the few artists who executed large figure pictures at this time I shall say very little, for the simple reason that there is very little to say. We all know Benjamin West’s pictures, and are fully aware of their tameness and insipidity.
I think that West is a striking example of a man who succeeded in impressing his character on his work. Highly respectable, prosaic, unimaginative, and rather goody, we find all these characteristics reproduced in his pictures, and yet many of these pictures, particularly “Death on the Pale Horse,” created a perfect furore at the time, and the prices the artist got for his works would be considered high even at the present day.
Hilton was undoubtedly the best of the very few artists who endeavored to revive large historical painting in England. He was at any rate a good draughtsman and an accomplished painter, but his too palpable imitation of the old masters will always prevent his taking rank with such men as Girodet, Géricault, or Gros.
Fuseli, with all his bombast and affectation of anatomical knowledge, showed occasionally that he possessed real genius. I know nothing finer in the whole English school than his ghost scene of “Hamlet.” The ghost is not one of those artificial bogies, so common in the works of Blake and Flaxman, but a right royal ghost, who stalks with gigantic strides across the stage. Fuseli was a very uneven painter. His pictures are generally ludicrous, but sometimes show real talent. He wanted ballast, and if West could have spared him a few tons of lead, both painters would have been greatly benefited.