The incursions into the realm of ideal and decorative art made by English painters of the eighteenth century may not be reckoned among the accepted triumphs of our school. Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, all alike inspired by high ambition and capable, as was shown by their untiring devotion and sacrifice in the cause they had espoused, lacked the means and the endowment to appear with any solid measure of success to an age that was in itself unfitted to receive the message they sought to convey. The untutored and undisciplined genius of William Blake affords an isolated example in his time of a true and deeper understanding of the secrets of the kind of art which these men vainly pursued; but even if Blake had possessed more ample resources as a painter he would none the less have spoken in a language that was strange to the temper of his time; and it was reserved for a later day to forge the means which would secure a genuine revival of the forgotten glories of imaginative design.
The movement associated with the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stands as a landmark in the modern history of our school, nor has it been without lasting influence upon the art of Europe. In the year 1848, which gave it birth, the outlook for painting which aimed at the presentation of any imaginative ideal was not encouraging. Etty, a painter of genuine endowment, still survived, and his unquestioned gifts as a colourist are plainly asserted in the single example included in the present exhibition; but the practice of his later years, as Holman Hunt has justly observed, scarcely offered the most fitting model to a young artist of serious ambition. On the other hand, the waning accomplishment of men who had passed their prime cried aloud for the need of a new return to nature; and the accepted conventions of style, either in themselves outworn or else imperfectly revealed by hands enfeebled and grown old, left the hour ripe for the advent of that small but greatly gifted group of young men whose rebel practice was destined to leave so strong an imprint upon their own and succeeding generations. It would perhaps be difficult to find three painters of equal power whose art was so differently inspired and whose achievement was destined to take such separate and widely divergent forms as Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who stand as the acknowledged heads in this new movement; but their efforts, at the time of which I am speaking, were bound together by a common purpose which prevailed then and has since continued to keep their names linked together in the modern history of our English school. In protest against the fetters imposed upon painting by the tradition of the past—fetters that were by common consent only to be removed by a renewed return to the facts of nature—they trod, in the season of their youth, the same road, although the ultimate development of their separate personalities led them, before many years passed, into paths widely divergent from one another. To judge Rossetti’s talent justly from works collected on the present occasion we must group together the examples in oil and water-colour. The religious phase in his career is indicated by “The Annunciation of the Virgin,” lent by Mrs. Boyce; while the freedom with which his imagination afterwards roamed over those great legends already made memorable in literature is shown by the “Mariana” and the “Dante meeting Beatrice” among the paintings in oil, and perhaps even more conclusively in the exquisite water-colour drawing of “Paolo and Francesca,” lent by Mr. Davis, which may be accepted as a capital instance of his unrivalled power to render the truths of human passion without violating the laws inherent in the art he professed. In his water-colours even more decisively than in his paintings in oil Rossetti clearly announces his great claims as a colourist; and his paintings bear this distinctive mark in their invention of colour that the ordered harmonies he can command are not only beautiful in themselves but that their beauty stands in clear and direct response to the nature of the chosen subject. In this regard assuredly neither of the two men who stand associated with him in the Pre-Raphaelite movement can claim to be his superior. It is perhaps unfortunate for purposes of comparison that the range of Millais’s talent is here not completely represented. “Sir Isumbras at the Ford” is indeed a characteristic example of his earlier period, though it hardly shows the qualities he could then command in the same degree of perfection as would be rendered by the presence of “Lorenzo and Isabella” or of “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.” We have, on the other hand, in the “Black Brunswicker” a notable example of that transitional period in Millais’s art wherein the claims of fancy and invention and the overmastering gifts of the realist—gifts that afterwards availed to set him as the greatest portrait painter of his time—are held in momentary balance; and we may find herein expressed an element of Millais’s painting which had already received supreme embodiment in the famous picture of “The Huguenot.” No artist of his time—perhaps no artist of any time—has ever excelled him in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that transfigure without disturbing the permanent beauty of feminine character. This power remained to him to the end of his career, and it was the perception of it which caused Watts to write to him in 1878, in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received deserved decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” It is impossible to say in the presence of work of this kind how much has been contributed by the model, how much conferred by the artist; but that the artist’s share in the result is predominant is proved by the fact that nobody else has combined in the same fashion the portraiture of individual features with the most delicate suggestion of the emotion that moves them. In the art of Holman Hunt, always masculine in its character and marked by the signs of indefatigable industry, emphasis is so evenly laid upon all the confluent qualities that contribute to the result that it is hard to signalise or to describe the dominating characteristics of his personality. In his treatment of religious subjects he showed a constant reverence that nevertheless scarcely touched the confines of worship; for the same earnestness of purpose, the same reverent research of truth, asserts itself no less in whatever subject engages his brush. Rare qualities of a purely pictorial kind nearly all his work may claim, and yet it is not always possible to concede to the result, however astonishing in its power, that final seal of beauty without which Art’s victory can never be deemed absolutely complete. “The Scapegoat,” here exhibited, was fiercely disputed at the date of his first appearance, and it is even now not difficult to understand that its appeal must have seemed strange to the temper of the time; but there can be no barrier at any rate to the generous appreciation of the noble qualities displayed in the “Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” or the austere simplicity and sincerity of “Morning Prayer.”
Around these three men who bravely heralded the new movement in English art are grouped the names of others who in different degrees were equally inspired by the principles the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to enforce. For although their earlier efforts encountered bitter attack from the accredited organs of public opinion, they met at the outset with warm response from within the ranks of art itself. The company of their followers at first, indeed, was small; but the quickened spirit of the time had already been in part prepared for the reception of the message they bore. The writings of John Ruskin, in whatever degree his particular judgments upon art matters may be disputed, had already availed to stir the conscience of his generation and to restore to art its rightful place in life. Henceforth it was not possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating place its spirit has been fast linked with the heart and life of the people; and the deep earnestness which in Modern Painters he brought to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work of men of the younger school.
William Dyce, by his declared devotion to the painters of the Quattrocento, had already in part anticipated the practice of the Pre-Raphaelites; and Ford Madox Brown, here represented both as a painter of portrait and as a master of design, though never formally enrolled in the brotherhood, claims by the inherent qualities of his work a prominent place in the revolution that was then in progress. He had been Rossetti’s first master, and to the end of his life, as I can testify, Rossetti retained for him the warmest affection, and Holman Hunt’s somewhat ungracious protest that the direction of his art would have clashed with the aims the Pre-Raphaelites had then in view must be surely deemed unconvincing in the presence of his great picture entitled “Work,” wherein an unflinching reliance upon nature is the dominant characteristic. Frederick Sandys, here admirably represented by the portrait of Mrs. Clabburn and by “Medea,” showed even more conclusively in his varied work in design his right to be reckoned side by side with the leaders I have named; while Burne-Jones, who always generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Rossetti, displayed as his powers developed a kindred attachment to the kind of beauty in painting which finds its well-spring in the art of Florence. The water-colours in the present collection represent him at a time when Rossetti’s example and influence were still dominant, but “Love among the Ruins,” lent by Mrs. Michie, and “The Mirror of Venus,” from the collection of Mr. Goldman, reveal to us the painter in the plenitude of his powers, when with full mastery of resource he revelled in the interpretation of themes of imaginative significance. A great colourist in the sense in which the Florentines use colour—a great designer, gifted from the outset with the power of striking into symbol forms of beauty that might equally serve to fire the fancy of a poet, Burne-Jones holds a unique position in our school; nor are his claims to admiration likely to suffer from the fact that the principles he professed have sometimes been adopted by imitators not sufficiently endowed for so high an endeavour.
In the story of a movement that limitations of space must needs leave inadequate it would be impossible to ignore or to omit the names of two men who worthily occupied a distinguished place in the art of their time. G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton may both be said to stand apart from the particular current of artistic revolution associated with the names I have already cited. The former was already deeply imbued with the spirit of the great Venetians even before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had come into being, but the poetic impulse, which he owned in common with his younger contemporaries, sets much of his work in clear alliance with theirs. His “Love and Death” illustrates in a form of unquestioned beauty the attempt to combine the sometimes divergent qualities of the two great schools of Italy; and the example set by both reappears in a union that is entirely satisfying when Watts turns to the task of portraiture. Nor could any better examples of his accomplishment have been procured than the figure of Lord Tennyson or the head of Mr. Walter Crane.
Lord Leighton’s finely cultivated talent, though his early sojourn at Florence had coloured the work of his youth, reveals at the hour of its maturity an undivided allegiance to classic ideals. His mediaevalism was a garb quickly discarded. “By degrees,” he once wrote to me, “my growing love for form made me intolerant of the restraints and exigencies of costume and led me more and more, and finally, to a class of subjects, or more accurately to a state of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand. These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles therefore of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.” With this confession of faith before us we may measure how far the unceasing labours of a long career availed to satisfy the noble purpose of his youth. A certain lack of virility, an imperfect sense of energy and movement which is needed to give the final sense of vitality to all art, however directed, may perhaps be alleged even against the most complete of his achievements; but the saving sense of grace, revealed in forms often finely proportioned and justly selected, remains as an abiding element in his constant pursuit of classic perfection, and is clearly enough illustrated in such works as the “Summer Moon” and the “Return of Persephone,” which the committee have secured for the present exhibition.
We must return now for a while to the earlier experiments of our school in order to trace the growth of the art of landscape, a department wherein by the consent of Europe our painters hold a place of indisputable supremacy. Gainsborough, as I have already hinted, had found in the surroundings of his Suffolk home the material he needed for the display of his deeply seated love of outward nature; and his achievements in this kind rest as the first foundation of what is most enduringly characteristic in English landscape painting. But as early as the year 1749, when Gainsborough was only a youth of twenty-two, Richard Wilson was already resident in Italy, and had begun that exquisite series of studies from Italian scenery which won so small a meed of praise from his own generation. The special direction of his art was not, indeed, destined to inspire many of those who came after him, for the new spirit of naturalism sought and captured certain qualities of dramatic expressions in the rendering of nature that were not of his seeking; nor was the ordered beauty of his compositions, or the serene charm which characterises his gift as a colourist, likely to be heeded by a race of painters who were already on the alert to seize and record those fleeting effects of changing light and tone which found such splendid embodiment in the vigorous painting of Constable. Constable’s frank reliance upon light and shade as constituting the final element of beauty in landscape could never have been accepted without reserve by Richard Wilson, but the pursuit which Constable initiated has owned an overpowering attraction for nearly all students of nature since his time; and his example, transported to France through the art of Michel, may be allowed to have powerfully inspired that distinguished group of French artists whose work was a part of the outcome of the modern romantic movement. It would be impossible here to distinguish in detail the separate work of English painters who have worthily carried forward the tradition established by Constable; nor is it needful now to vindicate the claims of men like Cotman, Cox, and Crome in an earlier time, or of Hook and Cecil Lawson, Sam Bough, Mason, and Frederick Walker, whose more recent work brings the story of this branch of art down to our own day. Of English landscapists, indeed, the name is legion, and at the head of them all, if we may judge by the extent of the fame he has won, stands the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose genius, heralded to the world by the eloquent advocacy of Ruskin, is here fully illustrated in superb examples from the collections of Mr. Chapman, Lord Strathcona, Mr. Beecham, and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Turner, in his youth, while he was still under the influence of Girtin, might well have owned kinship with Richard Wilson, as both in turn might have confessed their indebtedness to the great Frenchman, Claude Lorraine; but Turner’s talent, as it passed onward in steady development, parted completely with the shackles imposed by earlier authority and left him at the close of a brilliant career in a position of complete isolation and independence. There will always be those—and I may count myself among the number—who will turn with increasing love to the more restrained beauty of his earlier work, and who will seek rather in his water-colours than in his paintings in oil for the finer expression of those more individual qualities which marked the practice of his prime. But personal preference need count for little in the acknowledgment which all alike must freely render, that his genius has conferred a lasting glory upon the English school.
With this brief survey of the work of deceased British artists the mission of the critic may here fitly end. The purpose of such an introduction as I have attempted is sufficiently served if, in sketching the growth of our school from its foundation in the middle of the eighteenth century, I have succeeded in indicating the several diverse currents which have contributed to its development, and have left so rich a heritage in achievement and example to the men of a younger day. Of the varied quality of that later work the exhibition must be left to speak for itself. That the product of our time lacks nothing of vitality is sufficiently shown in the spirit of restless and untiring experiment which marks the varied output of our younger school; and that it still preserves among many of its exponents a loyal adherence to the imperishable traditions of the past is no less clearly asserted in the work of men who are now labouring with undiminished faith in the ideals established by an earlier generation. Of Subject and Portrait, in the art that leans for its support upon qualities of decorative design and in the direct and searching questionings of nature, noticeable in every direction and manifest specially in the treatment of landscape, there is a rich and abundant harvest in the present collection.
WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL
“Come down,” he wrote to me one day, “and see our Indian summer here. A dozen differently coloured torches you will find held up in our woods, for which, however, as well as for your sensitive skin, we require stillness and a smiling or sober sky.”