GESSNER.LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).
GESSNER.   LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).

Thus were the French gardens delivered by the English. Just as figure painting renounced lofty, architectural, formal composition, so those bisected and upholstered gardens were supplanted by irregular and, as it were, accidental bits of nature. People took no more trouble, in Rousseau’s phrase, “to dishonour nature by seeking to beautify her,” but laid out gardens in harmony with Goethe’s remark in Werther: “A feeling heart, not a scientific art of gardening, suggested the plan.” Close to Versailles, near the box-tree patterns of Lenôtre, lay the Petit Trianon, with its pond, its brook, and its dairy, where the unfortunate Marie Antoinette used to dream. And if painting still loitered on its preliminary return to nature, that only implied that the great artists—they only came in 1830!—were not yet born. Great artists can only raise themselves on the shoulders of their predecessors, whose value lies in their utility. The French landscapes of the eighteenth century, seen in the light of historical development, are of no importance; but, nevertheless, they gave a considerable stimulus in that they sought to animate the style of Poussin with a closer perception of nature. Hubert Robert is certainly strongly decorative, but he has a light touch; one cannot take him at his word, but he is intelligent, and has sometimes grey and green tones that are soft and beautiful. Joseph Vernet painted coast scenery, views of harbours, storms at sea, likewise with decorative, superficial effects of light; he let flashes of lightning streak black clouds, sun-rays dance over lightly ruffled waves, silver moonshine play mysteriously upon the water, and caused conflagrations to break out and red flames to shoot up to heaven. He is somewhat inane and motley in his colouring. But he had ceased to see in the parts of nature nothing but materials for the construction of nicely fitting scenery. He no longer attempted to speak to the reason by means of lines, but to touch the soul through humour, and he employed in his scenery not only buildings and ruins, gods and ancient shepherds, but also modern groups of every kind.

In Switzerland, the charming etchings and water-colours of Solomon Gessner must be especially mentioned. Ludwig Richter, indeed, pointed them out as the eighteenth century works which, after the engravings of Chodowiecki, he loved the best. Gessner venerated Claude, and had an enthusiasm for Poussin, but his pictures have no traces of the lofty style of the heroic school of landscape. He sketched his native meadows, trees, and brooks; he loved all that was small and secluded and cosy, arbours and hedges, quiet little gardens and idyllic nooks. He approached everything with a very childlike and faithful observation of nature. A second Swiss, Ludwig Hess, dedicated a similar subtile sense of nature and loving zeal as much to his native Switzerland as to the Roman Campagna.

L’Art.
GUARDI.VENICE.

The German Philip Hackert has been prejudiced rather than profited by the monument which Goethe erected to him. As Goethe’s enthusiasm was not in due proportion with Hackert’s importance, he ceased later to attract attention, though this he did not merit, as he was always a vigorous and healthy landscape painter. He did not see nature with the tender sensibility of the Swiss. He looked at a landscape somewhat insipidly, as Chodowiecki at his models. But his drawing is sober, the atmosphere of his pictures clear and fresh; he cannot be tedious in his composition. In Dresden there lived Johann Alexander Thiele, who roamed through Thüringen and Mecklenburg as a landscape painter. Even in Italy landscapes were the most independent performances which the eighteenth century had brought forth there. There worked in Rome the Netherlander, Vanvitelli, who depicted in graceful water-colours Roman and Neapolitan street life; and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the peintre des fêtes publiques, in whose pictures groups of richly coloured figures moved through splendid palaces. Venice was the home of the Canaletti. In Antonio Canale’s town pictures of Venice, Rome, and London there is at once so subtle an atmospheric movement, the water is so clear, the air so transparent, that even if they represent mere streets and buildings, they yet leave an impression of landscape achieved in a broad, pictorial method. Bernardo Canaletto produces an effect by the fine, cool, damp light of his northern studies even simpler and more intimate, while by his discovery that sunshine does not—as it was hitherto believed—gild but silver the object it falls on, he became one of the fathers of realistic landscape. The most ingenious, however, of the school of Canale, not to say one of the cleverest landscape painters of the century, was Francesco Guardi. Antonio Canale was a great artist, and shows it never better than in his distinguished etchings, but as a painter he interests the collector more than the connoisseur. There his qualities are too often petrified into an excessive formality; he shows something too much of the camera obscura. Guardi is ingenious and startling. Where you have accuracy in Canale, in him you find spirit. Canale shows us the real Venice, Guardi shows it as we have dreamed it to be. He has not Canale’s knowledge of perspective and architecture, but he fascinates us. He is a musician and a poet whose palette resounds with the purest harmonies. In his pictures the whole seductive legend of the fallen Queen of the Adriatic abides. Garlanded gondolas glide peaceful and fairy-like, majestic as vessels in some distant wonderland, over the clear, green water of the canals, beneath the high, marble palaces, which mirror their columns and balconies, their arches and their loggias in the stream. Foreign ambassadors pass in great state through the Piazza di San Marco; all that proud, Venetian nobility greets them; and thick throngs of people in their Sunday attire move to and fro beneath the Hall of the Procuration. Gay bands of musicians row along the Piazzetta and the Riva. A moist breeze sweeps over the water; the sunshine, now subdued and mellow, now dancing coquettishly, plays upon the water or on the houses. Francesco Guardi, the magician of Venice, is an animated, exquisite, always ingenious improvisatore, strong as few others are in the direct transference of his personal impression to canvas. Every stroke of his brush takes effect,—in each one of his pictures one sees the nervous exaltation of the hand; and that gives him a power of attraction which, compared with Canale, is like that of the clay model, in which the hand of the sculptor is still perceptible, compared with the cold, marble statue.

Even Spain, which, except for the colossal figure of Velasquez, had so far produced no painters of landscape—even Spain, after the middle of the century, turned into this road. Don Pedro Rodriguez de Miranda painted his broad, clear, and vigorously observed highland studies; Don Mariano Ramon Sanchez his small views of towns and harbours.

And, as in England, hand in hand with that came paintings of animals.

In France, François Canova was working, the painter of huge battle scenes and small pictures of animals; Jean Louis de Marne, who was famous for his cattle, market scenes, village pictures, and the like; and the great Jean Baptiste Oudry, who painted with breadth and freedom animals alive and dead, wild and tame, still-life of every kind. In Augsburg lived Johann Elias Riedinger, whose field of activity embraced the entire animal world, dogs and horses, stags and roes, wild boars, chamois, bears, lions, tigers, elephants, and the hippopotamus—which he depicted with fine observation, both in their proud solitude and at strife with men.

If we cast one more glance back to the road which art had travelled since the commencement of the century, we can have no doubt as to the end which was proportionately aimed at in all countries. Until quite recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit, in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. They painted what Dürer and the “little masters” had only graved upon wood blocks and copper plates. Still, they wished to paint these things less for their own sakes than because so intimate a light was shed upon them. Through elements of light they contrived to cast over everyday moments a sort of fairy inspiration. Watteau and his successors made a further advance in the conquest of the visible world, in that they desired to paint their age, for its own sake, in all its grace; and by the middle of the century we find this new, intimate, familiar art, independent of ancient tradition, triumphing all along the line. “Sublime” painting is more and more forsaken. Art becomes more and more indigenous to her world and age. Aristocratic Watteau is succeeded by Hogarth, Greuze, Chardin, and Chodowiecki, who treat the Third Estate no longer in the Dutch chiaroscuro, but in all its heavy reality as a valid object of art. Instead of that lofty, majestic, vainglorious painting of mere representations, which was the outcome of Cinquecento, and which at the expiration of the seventeenth century had sunk, through abstraction, into something uniform, trivial, and tedious, there appeared on all sides an art which was simple and sincere, which plunged into the life of every day, observed man in his relations with nature, with his fellows, with his faithful animals, and with his household goods—an art which created the variety of its representations out of its own experience. So with landscape, the most modern branch of art; it reached in the schools of all nations a greater significance—at least, in extent—than it had ever possessed in the history of art. And this development proceeded without its being established that any one country had direct influence on any other. The ideas hung in the atmosphere; they were the ideas of the century. It is as though the departing age would hold a mirror before us—a magic mirror—which foretells the future; as though it would point out that nineteenth century art, advancing further along this road, should be domestic-human, and that it should find in landscape its most appropriate expression.