But Prince Albert does not appear to have required a hint from Germany to appreciate the Scotch artist—son of a shoemaker—whose superior genius overshadowed that of his wealthy Irish brother. Already, while Dyce was as yet undiscovered, Maclise had been appointed to set about those grand works which adorn the passage to the House of Commons. But the poor sums which were paid to both of these artists, and the grudging way in which they were dealt with, are now remembered only as a scandal. Dyce was sharply censured because he would not promise exact dates for the completion of his seven frescoes whose payment had been fixed by the Treasury at stated periods. Being rich, he offered to refund; but the Treasury, knowing that this would arouse some indignation, found it convenient to reply that “no precedent” could be found justifying its acceptance of his offer! Any one who looks upon Maclise’s two pictures—“Trafalgar” and “Waterloo,” the latter with three hundred figures, each perfect in line and expression—can but feel scandalized that Parliament proposed to pay him only £2000. Goaded by the outcry among the artists, it at length raised the sum to £10,000, but then grew sulky and cut off many of the commissions. In reality Maclise paid £30,000 for the honor of making those pictures. He gave the whole of four years to them at a time when his regular work never brought him less than £10,000 a year. When Cornelius passed through a South German town the ovation was such as no prince could command. When Maclise had completed his frescoes the artists of London presented him with a gold chalk-holder. The Prince Consort did all he could to raise an enthusiasm for decorative art in this country, and to raise the wages and the position of the artist and of the artisan, and he succeeded measurably; but time has sadly shown that he must have imported the climate of Italy rather than its schools to make this a country of beautiful frescoes. Although Cornelius magnanimously declined the overtures made to him, as above stated, in favor of Dyce, he consented to come to London and give advice concerning the proposed works. It was owing to him that frescoes were determined upon. He had seen the glory of the great frescoes of Munich; he could not see that in a few years they would be peeling off (as they are now) even there. Fortunately, Maclise resolved to put on his frescoes in silica, and they are yet fairly preserved; but all the pictures in the Houses of Parliament have had to be retouched from time to time, and the silica has such an attraction for the atmospheric moisture that the effect of the colors is frequently diminished. While it is thus manifest that the corroding damp of the English climate is hostile to mural ornamentation, and fatal to external frescoes, there is a steady increase of the desire for such things. This has been especially manifested among the English nobility, who have everything in the wide world that their hearts can desire, excepting only the climate that might comport with luxury and beauty.
That barbaric element in the English aristocracy, of which I have before spoken, which Mr. Matthew Arnold half likes while he impales its eccentricities, is constantly revealed in the contrasts between the baronial halls of England and the majority of the homes of the wealthy middle class. One may take as a specimen of the taste of the latter any one of the fine club buildings on or near Pall Mall. Here one feels that he is stepping on floors which the Pompeians would have thought somewhat sombre, but would have enjoyed, and amid walls and arches which they would have recognized as familiar, though strangely gloomy. The halls are large and spacious, rather costly than rich, built of purest granites and marbles of various hue; the reading, dining, and smoking rooms are comparatively quiet, and built with a view to comfort alone. The clubs represent the desire of gentlemen of means to pass their hours of leisure in palaces, and these are secured at an expenditure of less than a hundred pounds each per annum, even in the best of such institutions. But when one visits the castles of the nobility, such as are still inhabited, the fondness for color and romance is at once manifest. They love their rooms now blue, now green, and again rose-colored. They love classical frescoes—nude Muses, Graces, and Cupids chiefly—on the ceilings, and gay tints on the walls even of sleeping-rooms. In a word, my lords were sensational, and in some cases descended to the most vulgar tricks, as in the case which Wordsworth rebuked so sternly. On the occasion of a visit to Dunkeld the poet was taken into a room lined with mirrors, and where an artificial water-fall was set going by a spring being touched. The water-fall was reflected one way in the mirrors, but another way in the poet’s face, and soon after in his rebuke of such mimicry of Nature:
“Ever averse to pantomime,
Thee neither do they know, nor us
Thy servants, who can trifle so.”
SPANDREL PICTURE.
But what could come of a generation trained by the royal standard which thought it beautiful to tie oranges bought in Covent Garden Market on the twigs of trees at Hampton Court for a garden party? The mansions of the nobility are still really the most tawdry and inartistic in their decorations of any class that have attempted decorations—mere blazings of white-and-gold; but there is an increasing number of exceptions, represented especially by some ancient families which have manifested a laudable desire to have their halls painted with pictures of legends or historical events connected with their neighborhood or their ancestors. Mr. William B. Scott, artist and poet, who has done excellent mural work of this character, has, I believe, fairly persuaded both the aristocracy and the artists of England that they cannot have Italian frescoes in this country, and must depend upon mural painting. In exhibiting specimens of his own excellent mural painting, before the Institute of British Architects, Mr. Scott made some interesting remarks on fresco. “In Italy,” he said, “the reign of fresco was a little more than a century in length. All the earlier works remaining are in tempera. Not many years ago it was not unusual to hear people talk of all early Italian wall paintings as fresco, but it is quite certain no such thing exists; the earlier frescoes, such as Mantegna’s works, in the Eremitani Chapel, in Milan, are miserable ruins; while the tempera pictures of Giotto, a century and a half older, in the Arena Chapel, in Padua, for example, are perfect. How, then, did it come about that fresco, which died out in Italy very shortly after Michael Angelo finished the Capella Sistini, had a revival in this nineteenth century in Munich and London? A very short narrative of the circumstances attending this revival will, I think, be enough. The associated body of young German students assembled in Rome in the beginning of this century aspired to better things than they found existing in the lifeless art about them. They reverted to the study of earlier art—to the actual reproduction of former art. They were also pietists—at least the two leaders, Overbeck and Cornelius; they found that their patron saint, Fra Angelico, painted in fresco; they found also that all the mythological, anti-religious pictures of the Bolognese school and later period were in oil: they determined on the revival of fresco. King Ludwig seconded them, and furnished an ample field for their success. The misfortune was, they did not go back far enough; they were self-denying men, and even the hardships and difficulties of fresco had attractions for them. It was like a revival of Tudor in mistake for a revival of the best period of Pointed architecture. Several English artists living in Rome, after the great success of the first very able works of these revivalists—my brother, David Scott, of Edinburgh, and William Dyce, for example—were smitten with the same feeling.”
Some eight years ago I had the pleasure of seeing the mural paintings with which Mr. W. B. Scott has decorated Sir Walter Trevelyan’s house, at Wallington, in Northumberland. No person could have been more appropriately selected for the work than Mr. Scott, who passed much of his early life in that region, and has written such beautiful poems upon its ancient legends. The first (ground-floor) series of paintings is on panels, enclosed between pilasters supporting arches; and a second is on the spandrels above the arches, in a corridor leading to the bedrooms, on the upper floor. The mansion is near the ancient Scottish Border, so haunted by romance, and near it may still be seen the remains of the ancient Roman Wall. In four of the panels the subjects are (1) the building of the Roman Wall; (2) King Egfrid offering the bishopric of Hexham to Cuthbert, hermit on Farne Island; (3) a descent of the Danes on the coast; (4) death of the Venerable Bede. On the opposite side are later subjects, but equally related to the same region of country: (1) “The Spur in the Dish”—the sign to the moss-trooper that the larder is empty; (2) Bernard Gilpin taking down the gage of battle in Rothbury Church; (3) Grace Darling and her father saving the shipwrecked crew; (4) “Iron and Coal”—the industry of the Tyne. The pilasters and the arcaded ends are also slightly decorated with foliage. The pictures on the spandrels are a series of eighteen on the old Border ballad of Chevy Chase. They are full of spirit, and their rich colors are like bursts of sunset along the ancient corridor. So much, indeed, depends on this color that it is impossible to convey the artist’s idea of mural painting by a woodcut. Nevertheless, I must confide to the imagination of my reader one characteristic design (page 147), “Women looking out for their Husbands and Brothers after the Battle of Chevy Chase.”
For his decoration of Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, Mr. Scott appropriately selected the old Scottish poem of The King’s Quair, or book (cahier, or quire, of paper), said to have been written by James of Scotland when a prisoner at Windsor, in 1420, on his love for Jane, granddaughter of John of Gaunt. The first picture shows the king in prison, turning from his reading for his pen. According to the canto in which the king describes his rising with the matin bell, there is pictured the bell, the warder, the night-watch going home, etc. In the second picture he looks from his window, and sees the fairest of womankind listening to the birds in the terraced garden. She has with her two maids and a little dog. Cupid—the Cupid of early art, a sort of pretty page—shoots at the king from behind a hedge. The third picture represents the royal poet’s dream, in which Master Cupid descends from the starry sphere to carry him away to the court of Venus, to obtain her assistance. These three pictures run along a flight of stairs, and the series is taken up with the next flight. In the fourth picture the poet finds all the lovers of history at the shrine of Venus. James prays on his knees to her, but she sends him to Dame Minerva’s court of wisdom for advice. Then we have the poet at the court of Minerva; next Lady Jane sending off the carrier-pigeon; and finally the royal poet receiving it. It requires but little reflection for any one to realize that to an ancient baronial castle such a series of paintings as this would be as the breathing of a soul beneath its gray ribs of rock. It must be mainly for the want of such pictures in them that servant-maids and children so often imagine ghosts rustling along old corridors and haunting antique stairways.
The castle of the Earl of Durham is graced by a fine stained window, illustrating the legend belonging to it of the slaying of the great worm, or dragon, by the Knight of Lambton; and the similar legend of Moore Hall is finely told in that mansion by the art of Professor Poynter. The last, however, is simply on canvas, and appeared as a large framed painting at the Royal Academy. It is, of course, necessary that a house should be very large and stately to bear mural paintings. The painting of panels is, indeed, becoming common in old houses which are well wainscoted, but as a general thing it is confined to the doors of more modern dwellings. However, a very fine effect has been produced in the dining-room of Mr. Birket Foster, at Witley, in Surrey, by inserting in the wall around the room a continuous painting by Burne Jones representing the legend of St. George and the Dragon. The stained glass which Morris & Co. have placed in the landing of the staircase, in the same beautiful residence, shows also that even a cottage-mansion of moderate size admits of a great deal more decorative color than is ordinarily supposed.