L’Art.S. Low & Co.
OLD CROME.A VIEW NEAR NORWICH.JOHN CONSTABLE.

As a man, too, he was one of those original characters seldom met with nowadays. He was not the fastidious gourmet that might have been expected from his pictures, but an awkward, prosaic, citizen-like being. He had a sturdy, thick-set figure, with broad shoulders and tough muscles, and was more like a captain in the merchant service than a disciple of Apollo. He was sparing to the point of miserliness, unformed by any kind of culture, ignorant even of the laws of orthography, silent and inaccessible. Like most of the great landscape painters of the century, he was city-bred. In a gloomy house standing back in a foggy little alley of Old London, in the immediate vicinity of dingy, monotonous lodging-houses, he was born, the son of a barber, on 23rd April 1775. His career was that of a model youth. At fifteen he exhibited in the Royal Academy; when he was eighteen, engravings were already being made after his drawings. At twenty he was known, and at twenty-seven he became a member of the Academy. His first earnings he gained by the neat and exact preparation of little views of English castles and country places—drawings which, at the time, took the place of photographs, and for which he received half a crown apiece and his supper. Thus he went over a great part of England, and upon one of his excursions he is said to have had a love-affair à la Lucy of Lammermoor, and to have so taken it to heart that he resolved to remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. In 1808 he became Professor of Perspective at the Academy, and delivered himself, it is said, of the most confused utterances on his subjects. His father had now to give up the barber’s business and come to live with him, and he employed him in sawing, planing, and nailing together boards, which were painted yellow and used as frames for his pictures. The same miserly economy kept him from ever having a comfortable studio. He lived in a miserable lodging where he received nobody, had his meals at a restaurant of the most primitive order, carried his dinner wrapped up in paper when he went on excursions, and was exceedingly thankful if any one added to it a glass of wine. His diligence was fabulous. Every morning he rose on the stroke of six, locked his door, and worked with the same dreadful regularity day after day. His end was as unpoetic as his life. After being several times a father without ever having had a wife, he passed his last years with an old housekeeper, who kept him strictly under the yoke. If he was away from the house for long together he pretended that he was travelling to Venice for the sake of his work, until at last the honest housekeeper learnt, from a letter which he had put in his overcoat pocket and forgotten, that the object of all these journeys was not Venice at all, but Chelsea. There she found him in an attic which he had taken for another mistress, and where he was living under the name of Booth. In this little garret, almost more miserable than the room in the back street where he was born, the painter of light ended his days; and, to connect an atom of poetry with so sad a death, Ruskin adds that the window looked towards the sunset, and the dying eyes of the painter received the last rays of the sun which he had so often celebrated in glowing hymns. He left countless works behind him at his death, several thousands of pounds, and an immortal fame. This thought of glory after death occupied him from his youth. Only thus is it possible to understand why he led the life of a poor student until his end, why he did things which bordered on trickery in the sale of his Liber Studiorum, and kept for himself all those works by which he could have made a fortune. He left them—taken altogether, three hundred and sixty-two oil-paintings and nineteen thousand drawings—to the nation, and £20,000 to the Royal Academy, and merely stipulated that the two best pictures should be hung in the National Gallery between two Claude Lorrains. Another thousand pounds was set aside for the erection of a monument in St. Paul’s. There, in that temple of fame, he lies buried near Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great ancestor of English painting, and he remains a phenomenon without forerunners and without descendants.

CONSTABLE.WILLY LOTT’S HOUSE.

CONSTABLE.CHURCH PORCH, BERGHOLT.

For it does not need to be said that Turner, with his marked individuality, could have no influence on the further development of English painting. The dramatic fervour of Romanticism was here expressed just as little as Classicism. It was only the poets who fled into the wilderness of nature, and sang the splendour and the mysteries of the mountains, the lightning and the storm, the might of the elements. In painting there is no counterpart to Scott’s descriptions of the Highlands or Wordsworth’s rhapsodies upon the English lakes, or to the tendency of landscape painting which was represented in Germany by Lessing and Blechen. Wordsworth is majestic and sublime, and English painting lovely and full of intimate emotion. It knows neither ancient Alpine castles nor the sunsets of Greece. Turner, as a solitary exception, represented nature stately, terrible, stormy, glorious, mighty, grand, and sublime; all the others, like Gainsborough, loved simplicity, modest grace, and virginal quietude. England has nothing romantic. At the very time when Lessing painted his landscapes, Ludwig Tieck experienced a bitter disappointment when he trod the soil where Shakespeare wrote the witch scenes in Macbeth. A sombre, melancholy, primæval maze was what he had expected, and there lay before him a soft, luxuriant, and cultivated country. What distinguishes English landscape is a singular luxuriance, an almost unctuous wealth of vegetation. Drive through the country on a bright day on the top of a coach, and look around you; in all directions as far as the eye can reach an endless green carpet is spread over gentle valleys and undulating hills; cereals, vegetables, clover, hops, and glorious meadows with high rich grasses stretch forth; here and there stand a group of mighty oaks flinging their shadows wide, and around are pastures hemmed in by hedges, where splendid cattle lie chewing the cud. The moist atmosphere surrounds the trees and plants like a shining vapour. There is nothing more charming in the world, and nothing more delicate than these tones of colour; one might stand for hours looking at the clouds of satin, the fine ærial bloom, and the soft transparent gauze which catches the sunbeams in its silver net, softens them, and sends them smiling and toying to the earth. On both sides of the carriage the fields extend, each more beautiful than the last, in constant succession, interwoven with broad patches of buttercups, daisies, and meadowsweet. A strange magic, a loveliness so exquisite that it is well-nigh painful, escapes from this inexhaustible vegetation. The drops sparkle on the leaves like pearls, the arched tree-tops murmur in the gentle breeze. Luxuriantly they thrive in these airy glades, where they are ever rejuvenated and bedewed by the moist air of the sea. And the sky seems to have been made to enliven the colours of the land. At the tiniest sunbeam the earth smiles with a delicious charm, and the bells of flowers unfold in rich, liquid colour. The English look at nature as she is in their country, with the tender love of the man nurtured in cities, and yet with the cool observation of the man of business. The merchant, enveloped the whole day long in the smoke of the city, breathes the more freely of an evening when the steam-engine brings him out into green places. With a sharp practical glance he judges the waving grain, and speculates on the chances of harvest. And this spirit of attentive, familiar observation of nature, which is in no sense romantic, reigns also in the works of the English landscape painters. They did not think of becoming cosmopolitan like their German comrades, and of presenting remarkable points, the more exotic the better, for the instruction of the public. Like Gainsborough, they relied upon the intimate charm of places which they knew and loved. And as a centre Norwich first took the place of Suffolk, which Gainsborough had glorified.

CONSTABLE.DEDHAM VALE.
L’Art.
CONSTABLE.   THE ROMANTIC HOUSE.

John Crome, known as Old Crome, the founder of the powerful Norwich school of landscape, is a healthy and forcible master. Born poor, in a provincial town a hundred miles from London, in 1769, and at first an errand boy to a doctor, whose medicines he delivered to the patients, and then an apprentice to a sign-painter, he lived completely cut off from contemporary England. Norwich was his native town and his life-long home. He did not know the name of Turner, nor anything of Wilson, and perhaps never heard the name of Gainsborough. Thus his pictures are neither influenced by the contemporary nor by the preceding English art. Whatever he became he owed to himself and to the Dutch. Early married, and blessed with a numerous family, he tried to gain his bread by drawing-lessons, given in the great country-houses in the neighbourhood, and in this way had the opportunity of seeing many Dutch pictures. In later life he came to know Paris at a time when all the treasures of the world were collected in the Louvre, and this enthusiasm for the Dutch found fresh nourishment. Even on his deathbed he spoke of Hobbema. “Hobbema,” he said, “my dear Hobbema, how I have loved you!” Hobbema is his ancestor, the art of Holland his model.