| HOGARTH. THE ENRAGED MUSICIAN. |
Moreover, to explain the growth of this sort of literary hybrid, one is forced to consider the changed conditions under which painting was introduced into England at large. Art, which hitherto had shone forth her enchantment upon the few, was conducted from the first in free England along the broad road of popularity, and given over to a public which had to be educated to art by degrees; and this admission of the mass of the people to the enjoyment of art, in a proportion hitherto unheard of, must inevitably have a retrogressive effect upon painting itself. Instead of the earlier amateur of really distinguished culture, there stood “the People.”
But just as in the Middle Ages works of art were seen to be a sort of picture-writing for the people—picturis eruditur populus, said Gregory the Great,—so now the new patrons could hardly require other than those works of art in which a story was pictorially told. These could be understood even by the man whose understanding was otherwise wholly closed to matters of art; and hence it came about that almost all the genre painters—for very nearly a century—followed with more or less intelligence in the footsteps of Hogarth. To treat him, as is frequently done, because of this popularisation of art, because of this transformation of the picture into the picture story, as a pattern instance of tastelessness, would lead to very dangerous consequences, and should be the less employed because Hogarth’s pictures are, at least, comparatively well painted, whereas many of his successors could escape the deluge only in the Noah’s Ark of their talent for narration. What Hogarth could do when he put off the schoolmaster, he has shown moreover in his portraits. There he is an entirely great painter. His pictures have none of that Van Dyck elegance, which had become the mode in England before him; they are robust, crude, Anglo-Saxon, strongly and broadly painted withal, sketches, in the best sense of the word. His “Shrimp Girl,” in the National Gallery, for instance, is a masterpiece to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival.
In the history of painting it is notorious that the latter half of the last century belongs especially to portraiture, and here the English occupy the first rank. Neither Hogarth nor Reynolds nor Gainsborough was a genius like Titian, Velasquez, or even Frans Hals. Their art is not to be compared with that of the greatest of all portrait painters, but they surpassed all the painters of the eighteenth century; they were not only the greatest in England since Van Dyck, but the first portrait painters in Europe at the time.
| HOGARTH. GIN LANE. |
Reynolds and Gainsborough lived almost at the same period. The former, born in 1723, died in 1792; the latter, born in 1727, died in 1788. They had as models men and women of the same society. They went the same road, side by side. Many celebrities strayed from one studio to the other, and were painted by Reynolds as well as by Gainsborough. These are just the pictures which show us so distinctly how widely the two, who were usually mentioned in the same breath, differed from each other in spite of having grown up on the same soil. Even their outward man displays this dissimilarity.
Reynolds appears in his “Portrait of Himself” in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, in the red mantle of the President of the Academy, the official cap on his head, while the hand resting on the table holds a copy of his Discourses; close by is a bust of Michael Angelo. The complexion is that of a man who sits much within doors. A pair of spectacles with large, round glasses leads one to conclude that he injured his eyesight early with much reading. Gainsborough, with his refined Roman nose, the haughty, curved sensuous lips, and the expression of his face which speaks at once of innocence and refinement, gives an impression far more than Reynolds of the child of nature and the gentleman. His cheeks are fresh and rather ruddy; a depth of soul lies within the large blue eyes, that are somewhat melancholy, yet have such a free outlook upon life.
| REYNOLDS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF. |
Joshua Reynolds’ father was a clergyman, a most learned man, who kept a Latin school. He gave the boy, it is recorded, that most uncommon Christian name, for the remarkable reason that he hoped thereby to draw the attention of a great personage, who bore the same name, towards his young namesake. His son was to become a physician. But books on other subjects which he read at his desk at school made a greater impression on the boy. In the well known Treatise on Painting, by Richardson, he discovered his vocation. From the perusal of this book he developed a taste for things artistic, studied the works on perspective of Pater Pozzo, read everything he could find on art, and copied as a preliminary all that fell into his hands in the way of woodcuts and copper engravings. One of the earliest drawings which remain from his childhood represents the interior of a library. At the age of nineteen he came to London to a well-known master, Hudson, the favourite painter with the gentry of the day, who required £120 with a pupil. He was already convinced that only in London could he find the means to attain fame, and even as early as 1744 he took a fine establishment and kept open house in order to attract attention. He was soon in a position to complete his artistic education by means of residence in Italy. In 1746 he had painted the portrait of a Captain Keppel, who shortly afterwards was appointed Commodore of the Mediterranean squadron, and invited the young painter to go for a cruise in his ship. They sailed in 1749, and Reynolds was able to spend three years in Italy.
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| Cassell & Co. | |
| REYNOLDS | MRS SIDDONS |