Daniel Chodowiecki
Goya’s vivid, realistic allegories, Blake’s fantastic, powerful conceptions, Chodowiecki’s living portrayal of the world of his day, no longer follow the beaten track of imitative work,—all these activities point to a new phase in art. All this seems a reaction, a protest against the mental attitude, the set standards and ideals of the eighteenth century. The vignette, so gay and graceful in the hands of Eisen, Gravelot, or Moreau, had lost much of its esprit in the heavier, more sober style of the Empire. The classical engraver was still in power, on the Continent as well as in England, where Boydell issued, in 1803, his monumental series of illustrations to Shakespeare’s plays in large folio plates. On the other hand, Constable had broken away from the accepted standards of landscape composition; he painted his native countryside as he saw it. England frowned upon him for this heresy, but his art was joyfully acclaimed in France. There arises everywhere a buoyant, youthful spirit, conscious of infinite possibilities, filled with unbounded aspirations. The leaders in the movement emancipate themselves from the sterile cult of precedent; they blaze new trails into the vast unknown, in their search for truth. Kant’s philosophy, Darwin’s theory of evolution, sufficiently denote the trend of the times; in literature, this is the period of Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, of Manzoni, of Goethe, of Nodier, Balzac, Victor Hugo. Barrye carries realism into his sculpture and such men as Delacroix, Decamps, and Célestin Nanteuil carry romanticism into French painting and French prints. Men, these, whose imaginative souls rebel against petrified classicism and formal, abstract beauty, and this protest of the young and ardent against the tyranny of the “old and accepted order of things” has been heard ever since,—sometimes the voice of coteries, sometimes that of individuals: Constable’s, for instance, which helped France in its remarkable awakening. His simple creed was faithfully transposed in terms of mezzotint by David Lucas. Unfortunately these effective landscape mezzotints are so fleeting in their delicate effects that they can be appreciated only in engraver’s proofs. The relative position of Constable and Turner, in English landscape, has been, not inaptly, compared with that of Van Dyck and Rubens in Flemish art. Certainly J. M. W. Turner was a sun in the English firmament, the painter of imposing canvases and water-colors of haunting loveliness; the leader likewise in a stupendous development of landscape engraving revealed in series like his “England and Wales” and his vignettes for “Roger’s Italy” among others of equal fame. Supreme among his prints stands a set known as “Liber Studiorum,” undertaken in rivalry with Claude Lorrain, whose memoranda sketches of pictures painted constitute the “Liber Veritatis,” engraved subsequently in England by Earlom. In his “Liber”[5] Turner proceeds to display his art in all its versatility, engraving some of the plates himself and closely supervising the mezzotinting of the others. This “Inverary Pier,” his own throughout, is a glorious vision of morning on the shores of Loch Fyne. The night mists are clearing in the sunlight; a luminous haze still trails along between the hills, beyond the quiet water. The scene suggests unbounded space and calm, peaceful beauty. Another plate, “Æsacus and Hesperie,” carries us into the depth of the woods. The figures are mere accessories: what we potently feel is the fragrant shade, emphasized by a slanting shaft of sunlight, which gleams on soil, branch, and leaf, and builds a pathway of light amidst the luminous shadows.
[5] A series of one hundred plates, seventy-one of which were published by the artist, then discontinued, because financially unsuccessful.
INVERARY PIER
From “Liber Studiorum.” J. M. W. Turner
ÆSACUS AND HESPERIE
From “Liber Studiorum.” J. M. W. Turner
* * * * *