His pictures were collectively “exact” views of places which he loved, and neither composed landscapes nor paintings of “beautiful regions.” Crome painted frankly everything which Norfolk, his own county, had to offer him—weather-beaten oaks, old woods, fishers’ huts, lonely pools, wastes of heath. The way he painted trees is extraordinary. Each has its own physiognomy, and looks like a living thing, like some gloomy Northern personality. Oaks were his peculiar specialty, and in later years they only found a similarly great interpreter in Théodore Rousseau. At the same time his pictures of the simplest scenes have a remarkable largeness of conception, and a subtlety of colour recalling the old masters, and reached by no other painter in that age. An uncompromising realist, he drew his portraits of nature with almost pedantic pains, but preserved their relation of colour throughout. And as a delicate adept in colouring he finally harmonised everything in the manner of the Dutch to a juicy brown tone, which gives his beautiful wood and field pictures a discreet and refined beauty, a beauty in keeping with the art of galleries.

L’Art.
CONSTABLE.THE CORNFIELD.

Crome took a long time before he made a way for himself. His whole life long he sold his work merely at moderate prices: for no picture did he ever receive more than fifty pounds. Even his end was uneventful. He had begun as a manual worker, and he died in 1821 as a humble townsman whose only place of recreation was the tavern, and who passed his leisure in the society of sailors, shopkeepers, and artisans. Yet the principles of his art survived him. In 1805 he had founded in Norwich, far from all Academies, a society of artists, who gave annual exhibitions and had a common studio, which each used at fixed hours. Cotman, whose specialty was ash-trees, the younger Crome, Stark, and Vincent, are the leading representatives of the vigorous school of Norwich; and by them the name of this town became as well known as an art-centre in Europe as Delft and Haarlem had been in former times.

Their relation to the Dutch was similar to that of Georges Michel in France, or that of Achenbach in Germany. They painted what they saw, rounded it with a view to pictorial effect, and harmonised the whole in a delicate brown tone. They felt more attracted by the form of objects than by their colour; the latter was, in the manner of the Dutch, merely an epidermis delicately toned down. The next step of the English painters was that they became the first to get the better of this Dutch phase, and to found that peculiarly modern landscape painting which no longer sets out from the absolutely concrete reality of objects, but from the milieu, from the atmospheric effect; which values in a picture less what is ready-made and perfectly rounded in drawing than the freshly seized impression of nature.

Hardly twenty years have gone by since “open-air painting” was introduced into Germany. At present, things are no longer painted as they are in themselves but as they appear in their atmospheric environment. Artists care no longer for landscapes which float in a neutral brown sauce; they represent objects flooded with light and air. People no longer wish for brown trees and meadows, for the eye has perceived that trees and meadows are green. The world is no longer satisfied with the indeterminate light of the studio and the conventional tone of the picture gallery; it requires some indication of the hour of the day, since it is felt that the light of morning is different from the light of noon. And it is the English who made these discoveries, which have lent to modern landscape painting its most delicate and fragrant charm.

The very mist of England, the damp and the heaviness of the atmosphere, necessarily forced English landscape painters, earlier than those of other nations, to the observation of the play of light and air. In a country where the sky is without cloud, in a pure, dry, and sparkling air, nothing is seen except lines. Shadow is wanting, and without shadow light has no value. For that reason the old classical masters of Italy were merely draughtsmen; they knew how to prize the value of sunshine no more than a millionaire the value of a penny. But the English understood the charm even of the most scanty ray of light which forces its way like a wedge through a wall of clouds. The entire appearance of nature, in their country, where a damp mist spreads its pearly grey veil over the horizon even upon calm and beautiful summer days, guided them to see the vehicle of some mood of landscape in the subtlest elements of light and air. The technique of water-colour painting which, at that very time, received such a powerful impetus, encouraged them to give expression to what they saw freshly and simply even in their oil-paintings, and to do so without regard for the scale of colour employed by the old masters.

John Robert Cozens, “the greatest genius who ever painted a landscape,” had been the first to occupy himself with water-colour painting as understood in the modern sense. Tom Girtin had experimented with new methods. Henry Edridge and Samuel Prout had come forward with their picturesque ruins, Copley Fielding and Samuel Owen with sea-pieces, Luke Clennel and Thomas Heaphy with graceful portrayals of country life, Howitt and Robert Hills with their animal pictures. From 1805 there existed a Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and this extensive pursuit of water-colour painting could not fail to have an influence upon oil-painting also. The technique of water-colour accustomed English taste to that brightness of tone which at first seemed so bizarre to the Germans, habituated as they were to the prevalence of brown. Instead of dark, brownish-green tones, the water-colour painters produced bright tones. Direct study of nature, and the completion of a picture in the presence of nature and in the open air, guided their attention to light and atmosphere more quickly than that of the oil-painters. An easier technique, giving more scope for improvisation, of itself suggested the idea that rounded finish with a view to pictorial effect was not the final aim of art, but that it was of the most immediate importance to catch the first freshness of impression, that flower so hard to pluck and so prone to wither.