FIG. 99.—BURNE JONES. FLAMMA VESTALIS.

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Bonington (1801-1828) died young, and though of English parents his training was essentially French, and he really belonged to the French school, an associate of Delacroix. His study of the Venetians turned his talent toward warm coloring, in which he excelled. In landscape his broad handling was somewhat related to that of Constable, and from the fact of their works appearing together in the Salon of 1824 they are often spoken of as influencers of the modern French landscape painters.

Turner (1775-1851) is the best known name in English art. His celebrity is somewhat disproportionate to his real merits, though it is impossible to deny his great ability. He was a man learned in all the forms of nature and schooled in all the formulas of art; yet he was not a profound lover of nature nor a faithful recorder of what things he saw in nature, except in his early days. In the bulk of his work he shows the traditions of Claude, with additions of his own. His taste was classic (he possessed all the knowledge and the belongings of the historical landscape), and he delighted in great stretches of country broken by sea-shores, rivers, high mountains, fine buildings, and illumined by blazing sunlight and gorgeous skies. His composition was at times grotesque in imagination; his light was usually bewildering in intensity and often unrelieved by shadows of sufficient depth; his tone was sometimes faulty; and in color he was not always harmonious, but inclined to be capricious, uneven, showing fondness for arbitrary schemes of color. The object of his work seems to have been to dazzle, to impress with a wilderness of lines and hues, to overawe by imposing scale and grandeur. His paintings are impressive, decoratively splendid, but they often smack of the stage, and are more frequently grandiloquent than grand. His early works, especially in water-colors, where he shows himself a follower of Girtin, are much better than his later canvases in oil, many of which have changed color. The water-colors are carefully done, subdued in color, and true in light. From 1802, or thereabouts, to 1830 was his second period, in which Italian composition and much color were used. The last twenty years of his life he inclined to the bizarre, and turned his canvases into almost incoherent color masses. He had an artistic feeling for composition, linear perspective, and the sweep of horizon lines; skies and hills he knew and drew with power; color he comprehended only as decoration; and light he distorted for effect. Yet with all his shortcomings Turner was an artist to be respected and admired. He knew his craft, in fact, knew it so well that he relied too much on artificial effects, drew away from the model of nature, and finally passed into the extravagant.

THE WATER-COLORISTS: About the beginning of this century a school of water-colorists, founded originally by Cozens (1752-1799) and Girtin (1775-1802), came into prominence and developed English art in a new direction. It began to show with a new force the transparency of skies, the luminosity of shadows, the delicacy and grace of clouds, the brilliancy of light and color. Cozens and Blake were primitives in the use of the medium, but Stothard (1755-1834) employed it with much sentiment, charm, and plein-air effect. Turner was quite a master of it, and his most permanent work was done with it. Later on, when he rather abandoned form to follow color, he also abandoned water-color for oils. Fielding (1787-1849) used water-color effectively in giving large feeling for space and air, and also for fogs and mists; Prout (1783-1852) employed it in architectural drawings of the principal cathedrals of Europe; and Cox (1783-1859), Dewint (1784-1849), Hunt (1790-1864), Cattermole (1800-1868), Lewis (1805-1876), men whose names only can be mentioned, all won recognition with this medium. Water-color drawing is to-day said to be a department of art that expresses the English pictorial feeling better than any other, though this is not an undisputed statement.

FIG. 100.—LEIGHTON. HELEN OF TROY.

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