Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was one of the most remarkable artists that ever lived; a most original genius, “without ancestors and without heirs.” He was a landscape painter and a most earnest and faithful student of nature, as shown by his wonderful illustrations, in black and white, of the scenery of England and Wales. In his paintings, however, he interpreted rather than portrayed nature, investing his subjects with the grandeur and glory of his imagination. His pictures were “golden dreams,” revealing the beauty, the majesty, the sadness, and the terror inspired by nature, not from observed details “but from the image or ideal in his own mind.” Of his many masterworks mention can only be made here of “Crossing the Brook,” “Dido in Carthage,” “Palestrina,” “The Golden Bough,” “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” “The Slave Ship,” “Battle of the Nile,” “Burial of Sir David Wilkie at Sea,” and perhaps the greatest of all, “The Fighting Téméraire.”
Turner created no school and left no successor, but he made a distinct impression on the art of England by stimulating an active interest in landscape painting. Patrick Nasmyth, Augustus Wall Callcott, John Linnell, and a score of artists turned to the study of rural scenery, with the result that they succeeded in establishing what is known as the Norwich school of landscape art. By far the most important name in the annals of this period, after Turner’s, is that of John Constable (1776–1837). Constable presents the contrast of diametric opposition to Turner. His pictures, so far from being “golden dreams,” are more like cast-iron realities. When Turner was an idealist, Constable was an uncompromising realist. If the one painted poetry, the other painted prose, and often very rugged, plain prose indeed. While Turner subordinated fact to fancy, illuminating his subjects with the glow of his fervid imagination, Constable devoutly stood before nature in the attitude of a worshiper, and faithfully labored to represent as truthfully as his powers permitted exactly what he beheld. In contrast with the shining canvases of his brilliant contemporary, Constable’s pictures seemed dark, dull, and heavy to the British public, and the original genius of the conscientious artist was not recognized. His greatest works, “Dedham Vale,” “The White Horse,” “The Hay Cart,” “Stratford Mill,” “Salisbury Cathedral,” “The Rainbow,” and others were exhibited in succession during the second decade of the century, before an indifferent public, only his fellow artists and a few connoisseurs caring for them, the painter meanwhile starving in neglect.
In 1824 two of his pictures were shown in Paris, and were then instantly understood and appreciated. They created a profound impression and, as has been justly said, inaugurated the second revolution of the century in the realm of art. By this revolution the artists were driven out of their studios and out of the city, to study nature in the spirit of humble sincerity shown by John Constable. Among the young students who went forth to encounter poverty, hardship, and the severest toil were the “men of 1830,” the founders of the Barbizon school of painting. Millet, Rousseau, Diaz, Corot, Troyon, Daubigny, and Dupré left Paris and the ways that then led to success, and sacrificed themselves to what they saw to be the truth in art. They carried the study of out-door nature further than ever before; created the standard of modern landscape art, and attained immortal fame, though not until their leader and prototype had perished in poverty.
CHRISTMAS CHIMES. (BLASHFIELD.)
WHISPERS OF LOVE. (BOUGUEREAU.)
Jean François Millet (1815–1875) has been called the greatest painter of the nineteenth century, and his masterpiece, “The Angelus,” is regarded by many as second only to the “Sistine Madonna” of Raphael in the brief catalogue of the world’s artistic treasures. He lived the life of a poor peasant in the rural village of Barbizon, attracting around him, late in life, the ablest of the “men of 1830,” and producing there those works which have placed his name first on the annals of our time: “The Sower,” “Waiting,” “Sheep-shearers,” “Woman Carding,” “The Gleaners,” “Shepherdess and Flock,” and the few others that constitute the tale of his exceedingly careful and long-considered compositions.
Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) was declared, by Edmond About, to be the Moses who led the landscape painters of France out of the Egyptian bondage of academic convention into the promised land of liberty, where rivers ran water, where trees were rooted in the ground, and where animals lived, moved, and had their being. As late as 1848 the Salon rejected Rousseau’s noble work, “The Alley of Chestnut Trees,” one of the finest landscapes ever painted; but this was the last act of the academic tyrants, the foolish offense against the great master causing the old classic pedants to be relegated to oblivion. Rousseau took up his residence in Barbizon, and in the forest of Fontainebleau and the adjoining country studied those rural and pastoral scenes that have given him his place as one of the first, if not the very first, of landscape painters. Of these magnificent examples of landscape art, mention can only be made here of “The Village,” “A Pool under Oaks,” “Edge of the Forest at Barbizon,” “A Forest Interior,” “Water Course at Sologne,” and “Hoar Frost,” these being the pictures best known to the public through reproductions in black and white.