My present lecture is on David and his school, and therefore I might have omitted altogether the contemporary English painters. However, as I have mentioned some, I should be sorry to omit from my very short list the name of Stothard. Of all the English figure-painters of this period, Stothard had the greatest feeling for composition. With a little more power and correctness in his drawing, he would have been an English Prudhon. Even with all his feebleness of draughtsmanship he is to me always attractive. There is so much bonhomie about his work, such an absence of pretence and humbug, and so evident a desire always to do his best, that although we cannot close our eyes to his shortcomings, we may well condone them for the sake of the good honest feeling which pervades almost all his compositions.
I prefer to pass unnoticed one or two aspirants to high art, who in the first half of the present century were thought a good deal of. Some people still believe in them, but as I never did, I would, rather say nothing about them, particularly as their work is foreign to the subject of my lecture.
It is pleasant to turn from a kind of art with which I have no sympathy, to more recent efforts, and to be able to speak more favorably of English historical painting before closing my lecture.
We have had in Etty a colorist both brilliant and original; a painter who proved that it was quite possible to excel in color without imitating either the Venetians or Rubens; and in Dyce a draughtsman of the most severe and refined kind, a master of composition, and a most thorough artist.
I have often heard it remarked that Dyce’s mural paintings are very Germanic in style, but to my thinking there is but the slightest likeness to any work of the Munich or Dusseldorf masters. His figures never have the labored self-conscious action which is so characteristic of the school of Cornelius. Of course, frescoes representing King Arthur and his knights must have a sort of family resemblance to illustrations of the Niebelungen legends, but the resemblance is merely superficial. A closer comparison will prove how much more true, and therefore more dramatic, is the action in Dyce’s figures.
There is an old adage which tells us that “knowledge is power,” but in art this hardly holds good. You may have plenty of knowledge and yet not have power; though, on the other hand, you can hardly have true power without knowledge.
Dyce had both in an eminent degree, whereas Schadow, Kaulbach, Piloty, and most of the great German artists, though decidedly learned painters, had not the power of turning their learning to good account.
It is obvious that I cannot continue my remarks down to the present time, but I may be allowed to express an opinion that (in this Academy at least) feeble mysticism or blatant quackery is no longer associated with high art. We have, of course, our faults, but history-painters do not, as formerly, lag hopelessly behind their colleagues in genre, portrait, and landscape art.
This happy result is entirely due to a return to old David’s system of teaching; namely, to a diligent study of the antique, supplemented by a long course of drawing from nature. Such an excellent competition as we recently had for the gold medal would have been simply impossible fifty years ago.
I don’t want to flatter the rising generation, nor to tell them that they have twice as much talent as their fathers, and ten times as much as their grandfathers; but what I wish to point out is, that by patient study and diligent work a much higher result can be obtained than by spasmodic effort or crazy enthusiasm.