The one great and honourable exception to this narrowness has been the illustrated art journal l’Art, which has certainly done all in its power to overcome the narrowness of French prejudice against English painting, but l’Art is not a purely French enterprise. One of its editors is a Belgian who speaks English and visits England very frequently.
Opinions of French Artists.
The most cultivated French artists are not insensible to the qualities of English art. Those who know Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilkie, Turner, Constable, see that there are some interesting qualities in their works. Flaxman, too, has considerable reputation in France through his designs in illustration of Homer. English engravings after Landseer have been bought in France rather extensively by lovers of animals, and la vignette anglaise, such as the vignettes after Turner, has long been esteemed as rather a favourable example of the pretty in art as distinguished from what is serious and elevated.
Constable in France.
Constable alone, of all English artists, has had a practical effect in France. For readers unacquainted with the fine arts I may say that two of Constable’s pictures, exhibited in Paris during his lifetime, produced such a revolution in French ways of looking at nature that they founded the modern French school of landscape. They were, in fact, much more influential in France than in the painter’s native land.
Celebrity of French and English Painters.
American Opinion.
With this unique exception, due to French weariness of conventionalism and thirst for freshness at that particular time, there has never been any English force in art comparable, beyond the frontier, to that of the French school which radiates all over the world. The fame of an English painter is insular, that of a Frenchman, of the same relative rank, is planetary. Even the United States of America, bound as they are to England by close ties of language and literature, follow, almost exclusively, French direction in painting. The Americans appear not only to have accepted all French painters who have any celebrity at home, but they have adopted, almost without question, the antagonism of French critics towards everything that is English in the fine arts. This is the more remarkable that the inhabitants of the United States certainly look to English opinion in other matters much more than to French. They do not greatly respect or esteem the French, and they do certainly respect and esteem the English, in spite of occasional differences.
Influence of French Art in England.
The most signal triumph of French art has not been its influence on the continent of Europe but in England itself, where it has modified the tendencies of the existing school both in choice of subject and in technical execution. Through French influence English painting has been brought nearer to continental painting. At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 there was not that shock of surprise on passing from foreign sections to the British that seized the spectator in 1855. It is safe to predict that in 1889 the sense of strangeness will have still further diminished.