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GAINSBOROUGH.MRS. SIDDONS.
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GAINSBOROUGH.WOOD SCENE, VILLAGE OF CORNARD, SUFFOLK.

In the domain of landscape painting, too, the new germs of naturalism, which had ventured above ground on all sides in the fifteenth century, had been again stunted in the Great Renaissance. The theory had been promulgated in the sixteenth century—in accordance with the idealistic methods of the age—that it behoved the painter to improve upon nature just as much as upon the human body. With the lofty style of the great figure painters, and their artfully pondered composition, there corresponded a school of landscape which was likewise conceived of, in the first degree, as an honourable, architectural framing for a mythological episode. England too possessed, in Richard Wilson, a believer in this doctrine, which became so widely promulgated in the seventeenth century through the influence of Claude Lorraine. The home of his soul was Italy. He scraped together a small sum of money by portrait painting, borrowed the rest, and felt himself in his element for the first time when he had reached Venice. Here, at the instance of Zucarrelli, he became a painter of landscapes, and was aided in his endeavours by Joseph Vernet in Rome. He was on the way to become a painter in great request, and in many of his pictures he shows a most delicate notion of well-balanced and gracious composition in the manner of Claude. But his success was of no long duration. Wilson, like so many other of his contemporaries, had the fixed idea that the Creator had only made nature to serve as a framework for the “Grief of Niobe” and as a vehicle for classical architecture. The interpolated stage scenery of trees and the classic temples of this English Claude, contain nothing which had not been already painted better by the Frenchman. When the king, in order to assist him, asked him on one occasion to represent Kew Gardens in a picture, he composed an entirely imaginary landscape and illuminated it with the sun of Tivoli. The king sent him back the picture, mordant epigrams appeared in the journals, and Reynolds scoffed at him in his Discourses. After that Wilson spent his days in the alehouse, until he got delirium, and died half starved at the age of seventy.

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GAINSBOROUGH.THE MARKET CART.GAINSBOROUGH.THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE.

The patriotic English were too much bound up with their own soil to acquire a taste for the exotic, ideal scenery of Wilson. There existed in them that patriotism, that feeling for home, which had turned the Dutch of the seventeenth century into landscape painters. In this province also they were destined to step in, as the inheritors of the Dutch, to bring the germ of intimate landscape to its full fruition. Lovely and luxuriant valleys with their soft grass, sweet woodlands with their vari-coloured foliage, golden, swaying cornfields and picturesque little cottages, with that indescribable softness of atmosphere, must of themselves direct the eye of the writer and the painter to all these beauties. It was an Englishman who in the eighteenth century wrote the most memorable book upon the charms of nature. James Thomson, in his Seasons, is the first great nature painter amongst the poets. Taine finds the whole of Rousseau anticipated in him. “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had forestalled all the sentiments of Rousseau, almost in the same style.” He has not only, like Rousseau, a profound feeling for the great wild aspects of nature, for the forms of clouds, effects of light and contrasts of colour, but he delights also in the smell of the dairy, in small birds, in the woodland shadows, and the light on the meadows,—in all things sequestered and idyllic.

“Nature! great parent! whose unceasing hand Rolls round the Seasons of the changeful year, How mighty, how majestic are thy works! With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul That sees astonished and astonished sings.”
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GAINSBOROUGH.THE SISTERS.
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GAINSBOROUGH.   THE WATERING PLACE.

It was a remarkable chance which ordained that Thomas Gainsborough, the first man who as a painter depicted the gracious charms of the country of his birth, the comeliness of its expanses of deep green lush meadows, the strength of the lofty, wide-spreading trees, as seen with the eyes of a lover, should be born in the spring of the same year in which Thomson’s Spring appeared. That he knew and admired Thomson is proved by his dedication to him of that delightful “Musidora” in the National Gallery, a lovely woman bathing her feet in some shady forest pool. It is said that he only sent half a dozen landscapes to the Academy during the eighteen years that he exhibited there. On the other hand, they hung in his house in Pall Mall in long rows on the walls of his studio. After his death his widow held a sale, at which fifty-six landscapes were sold. Gainsborough must be accounted one of the moderns, so naïve and intimate is the impression which his pictures produce. He, who passed his whole youth in the idyllic loveliness of the woods, was fitted to be the delineator of that mellow English nature. He understood the murmur of the brooks and the sighing of the winds. Like his own life, so regular and peaceful, gently swaying as though to the friendly elements, are the trees in his pictures, with their peaceful tranquillity; no storm disturbs the calm of a Gainsborough picture. His was a contented, harmonious spirit, like Corot’s. His landscapes know no tempestuous grandeur; they are a playground for children, a place for shepherds to rest. “The calm of mid day, the haze of twilight, the dew and the pearls of morning,” said Constable, “are what we find in the pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.... As we look at them the tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his bundle of faggots, whispering woods and open dales, sweet little peasant children with their pitchers in springtime,—that is what he loved to paint and what he painted, with as much sought-out refinement as with tender truth to nature.” His landscapes are like windows opening on the country, not compositions, but pieces taken straight out of that fruitful English nature. Every year he used to return to his green pastures, and paint very early, when the sun rose. Before him rose a cluster of trees, all round the farm the flocks were grazing, thousands of busy bees flew buzzing from flower to flower; goats, with their kids, were feeding in the meadows, wild doves cooed, and the birds in the wood sang their praises to the Creator. Thus do the landscapes of Gainsborough affect us. They are soft and tender as some sweet melody in their discreet intimacy, without colorist effects, as wonderfully harmonious as nature herself. A thatched cot, that peeps timidly from between the great trees, a silvery dale shut in by weeping willows, a bridge leading to some lush, green meadow,—those are Gainsborough’s materials. The famous “Cottage Door” is now at Grosvenor House. A young peasant woman, with her youngest child in her arms, is standing by the door of a country cottage, before which her other children are playing, some half naked; deep contentment is all around, huge old oaks spread their sheltering branches over the roof on both sides; golden rays of sunshine dance across the meadow. Only Frederick Walker has, in later days, painted such peasant women and such children, at once so tender and so natural. Of the four pictures in the National Gallery, “The Wood Scene,” “The Watering Place,” “Market Carts,” and “Peasant Children,” “The Watering Place” is the most celebrated. In the foreground a quiet pasture with cows, close by the herdsman, a Suffolk labourer; in the background a noble old Norman castle, perhaps Hedingham Castle, near Sudbury. It is through pictures like these that England has become the native-land of intimate landscape—paysage intime.

As figure painters, as well as landscape painters, the English in the eighteenth century laid a course of their own, and it was not long before the other nations followed them.