Reynolds loved to depict his sitters in mythological or historical settings. Thus he painted Mrs. Hartley, her son as a nymph and the youthful Bacchus, the three Misses Montgomery as the Three Graces crowning a term of Hymen, a little girl sitting on the grass as the “Age of Innocence,” Lady Spencer as a gipsy telling her brother’s fortune, Mrs. Sheridan as St. Cecilia. The five “Heads of Angels,” as they are called, in the National Gallery, are five different studies of the lovely child-head of little Isabella Gordon. Garrick, in one of his pictures, is set between the allegorical figures of Tragedy and Comedy. Reynolds himself was frankly proud of these portraits in the mood of history. He was, as he said, in general only a portrait painter because the world required it; that which he aspired after was the great manner of historical painting. Nevertheless, pictures, such as the “Little Hercules with the Serpent,” “Cupid unfastening the Girdle of Venus,” “The Death of Dido,” “The Forbearance of Scipio,” “The Childhood of the Prophet Samuel,” or “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” do not cause us to deplore too bitterly that he rarely found time for such mythological and historical pictures. His putti are derived from Correggio; in the arrangement of drapery he resembles Guido; in his “Venus” he is a coarser Titian. Reynolds’ own manner in these pictures is merely the eclectic accumulation of the peculiarities of the old masters—he brought no new element into historical painting.

And herein lies his principal weakness. Hogarth declared: “There is only one school, that of nature.” Reynolds: “There is only one doorway to the school of nature, and of that the old masters hold the key.” The great men of old were for him the object of constant and conscious thought. He has endeavoured in his writings to propound a sort of general foundation of painting, has adopted the principles of the best painters in every land, was indefatigable in exploring the secrets of the old masterpieces, and has therefore won the praise of having set the English school, which had hitherto possessed no perfected tradition of painting, technically on firm feet. He was the founder of a scientific technique of painting derived from the ancients,—the Lenbach of the eighteenth century. Upon the mixture of colours, the gradations of light and shade, technically and æsthetically, no artist has pondered more than he, who knew the great Netherlanders, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt, as well as, or better than, his particular favourites, the Italians. He made experiments all his life long to discover the stone of the wise Venetians; but he met with the same experience as Lenbach. And these experiments in the direction of the colour effects of the old masters were the bane of his pictures’ durability. It was well said by Walpole: “If Sir Joshua is content with his own blemished pictures, then he is happier than their possessors, or posterity. According to my view, he ought to be paid in annual instalments, and only so long as his works last.” And Haydon opined that “Reynolds sought by tricks to obtain results which the old masters attained by the simplest means.” He endeavoured by means of asphaltum to give his pictures the artistic tones of the galleries, with the result that, to-day, the majority have lost every sign of freshness.

REYNOLDS.BISHOP PERCY.REYNOLDS.THE GIRL WITH THE MOUSETRAP.

With regard to the pose also, and similar conceptions, one can never quite get away from the thought of Van Dyck and other old masters. Reynolds’ chief endeavour, not only as regards colouring, but also in other respects, was to resemble the ancients, and this has brought into his pictures something imitative and laboured. He dearly loved the Romans and Venetians; we believe to-day that he loved almost too dearly the Bolognese. And just that fine, artistic education which he received in Italy and Holland, and the scientific method in which he practised his art, did harm to Reynolds, and brought into his pictures too much reminiscence, too many alien touches. He has in most cases understood it—how to bring into uniformity the numerous borrowings of his palette, all that he had taken from Leonardo, Correggio, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. Yet he has never quite forgotten the old masters and looked only at his model, for the sake of the very daintiest lady or the freshest English boy. For his children he thought of Correggio’s “Cherubim,” for his schoolboys of Murillo, for the portrait of Mrs. Hartley of Leonardo da Vinci, for that of Mrs. Sheridan of Raphael. There lacked in him that spontaneity which denotes the great master. By his erudition in art, Sir Joshua elevated himself on the shoulders of all who had preceded him. He obtained thereby the piquant effects in his portraits, but it was at the price of the penalty that from many of his works it is rather a rancid odour of oil and varnish which exhales than the breath of life.

Gainsborough can certainly not be compared with Reynolds in the mass of his work. He was master neither of his powers of industry nor of his smooth and brilliant methods of painting that were always sure of their effect. In many of his pictures he gives the impression of a self-taught man, who sought to help himself to the best of his power. Just as little has he the psychological acuteness of Reynolds. A portrait painter puts no more into a head than he has in his own; thus the acute thinker, Reynolds, was able to put a great deal into his heads, whilst Gainsborough, the dreamer, was often enough quite helpless when he confronted a conspicuously manly character. In his whole temperament a painter of landscape, before his model too he sat as before a landscape, with eyes that perceived but did not analyse. What, with Reynolds, was sought out and understood, was felt by Gainsborough; and therefore the former is always good and correct, while Gainsborough is unequal and often faulty, but in his best pictures has a charm to which those of the President of the Academy never attained. Gainsborough, too, at his death murmured the name of an old master. “We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.” But what distinguishes him from Reynolds, and gives him a character of greater originality, is just his naïve independence of the ancients, which resulted partly from the different nature of his education in art. Reynolds had lived for two years in Rome and explored all the principal cities of Italy, had visited Flanders and Holland, learnt to wonder at Rembrandt, and developed an enthusiasm for chiaroscuro. Gainsborough in his rural seclusion had been able neither by travel on the Continent to study the great masters of the past, nor to assimilate the traditions of the studio. He contented himself with the beauties which he saw in his native country, studied them in their touching simplicity, without troubling himself about academic rules. He lived in London until his death, without once leaving England; and that gives to his pictures a distinct nuance. The one studied pictures and books, the other only the “book of nature.” His portraits never aim at any external effect, nor are they raised into the historical; they seek to give no other impression than that of a quite subjective truth to nature, both in arrangement and in colouring. Nothing intruded between his model and himself, no “sombre old master” obscured his canvas. His execution is more personal, his colour fresher and more transparent. The very personages seem with him to be more elegant, more gracious, more modern than with Reynolds, in whose work, through their kinship to the Renaissance, they received a suggestion of style, classical and ancient.

In his pictures the Englishman is clearly revealed, an Englishman of that delicacy and noble refinement which is present to a unique degree in the works of English painters of the present day.

REYNOLDS.   DR. BURNEY.

The passage from Hogarth to Gainsborough marks a chapter in the history of English culture. Hogarth is the embodiment of John Bull; you can hear him growl, like some savage bull-dog. That brutal, indecorous robustness of England’s aggressive youth becomes, in Gainsborough’s hands, agreeable, refined, gentle, and seductive. Reynolds, with his robustness as of the old masters, might be best compared with Tintoretto; Gainsborough, in his quite modern and fantastic elegance, is a more tender, subtle, and mysterious spirit, poet and magician at once, like Watteau. There one listened to the full, swelling chords of the organ; here to the soft, dulcet, silvery notes of the violin. Reynolds loved warm, brown and red tones; Gainsborough essayed for the first time, in a series of his happiest creations, that scale of colour, coldly green and blue, in which to-day the majority of English pictures are still painted. Everything with him is soft and clear; the tone of those blue or light yellow silks, which he loved especially, is that of the most transparent enamel; the background fades away into dreamy vapour, the figures are surrounded with an atmosphere of seduction. What a masterpiece he has created in the “Blue Boy,” his most popular and most individual picture. One can describe every piece of the clothing, but it is impossible to reproduce the harmony of the painting, the rich, pure blue of the costume, which stands out against a lustrous, brown background of landscape. How the stately youth stands, noble from head to foot, in the brown and green autumn landscape, with its canopy of sky! Master Bootall was by far the most elegant portrait painted in England since Van Dyck, and withal of a nervosity quite new. See that youthful pride in the gaze, that mobile sensibility in the pose!

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH.

Have men grown different, then, or does the painter see further? One finds in Van Dyck no such expressively nervous physiognomy. The suggestion of melancholy, the deep reverie, the noble, aristocratic haughtiness,—Gainsborough was the first to discover that, and give it its full expression. And the same man who painted the noble elegance of this youthful grand seigneur depicted also peasant children coming fresh from the green fields and woodlands of their village homes. In Sir Joshua’s children there was often something borrowed from Correggio; the children of Gainsborough breathe a rustic charm, an untamed savagery; they are the very offshoots of nature, who disport themselves as freely as the wild things in the woods. But his women in particular are creatures altogether adorable. While Reynolds, the historical painter, liked to promote his into heroines, those of Gainsborough, with their pure, transparent skins, their sweet glances (in which there lies so admirable a mixture of languishing fragility, innocence, and coquetry), are the true Englishwomen of the eighteenth century. His “Mrs. Siddons” is not in theatrical costume, but in a simple walking-dress; no Tragic Muse, but the passionate, loving woman who once, a romantic, impulsive miss, escaped from a convent at the risk of her life, to join a handsome young actor of her father’s troupe who had entirely fascinated her. What a charming grace in the pose, what fine taste in the arrangement, what wonderful purity of colouring! With the exception of Watteau, I know of no older master who could have painted such moist, dreamy, sensuous, tender eyes. The marvellous “Mrs. Graham,” in the National Gallery of Scotland, is, from the purely pictorial standpoint, perhaps the greatest of all his works. Yet how beautiful is the double portrait of that young married couple, the Halletts, who, tenderly holding hands, pass along a deserted path in some secluded garden; or that pale, languishing “Mrs. Parsons,” with her enchanting smile, and that mysterious language of the eyes. Gainsborough was no keen observer, but he was a susceptible, sensitive spirit who intercepted the soul itself, the play of the nerves, the slightest suggestion of spiritual commotion. There moves through the majority of his portraits a pathetic tenderness, a breath of dreamy melancholy, that the persons themselves hardly possessed, but which he transfused into them out of himself. Melancholy is the veil through which he saw things, as Reynolds saw them through the medium of erudition. Reynolds was all will and intelligence, Gainsborough all soul and temperament; and nothing can show the difference between them better than the fact that Reynolds, who had formed his style on early models, when he had no sitters painted historical pictures; whilst Gainsborough in like circumstances painted landscapes. Herein he was a pioneer, whilst Reynolds was an issue of the past.