Mansell
BONINGTON.LA PLACE DES MOULARDS, GENEVA.

The problem of painting light and air, which the older school had left unsolved, was taken up by him first in its complete extent. Crome had shown great reserve in approaching the atmospheric elements. Constable was the first landscape painter who really saw effects of light and air and learnt to paint them. His endeavour was to embody the impression of a mood of light with feeling, without lingering on the reproduction of those details which are only perceptible to an analytical eye. Whereas in the old Dutch masters the chief weight is laid on the effect of the drawing of objects, here it rests upon light, no matter upon what it plays. Thus Constable freed landscape painting from the architectonic laws of composition. They were no longer needed when the principle was once affirmed that the atmospheric mood gave greater value to the picture than subject. He not only studied the earth and foliage in their various tones, according as they were determined by the atmosphere, but observed the sky, the air, and the forms of cloud with the conscientiousness of a student of natural philosophy. The comments which he wrote upon them are as subtle as those in Ruskin’s celebrated treatise on the clouds. A landscape, according to him, is only beautiful in proportion as light and shadow make it so; in other words, he was the first to understand that the “mood” of a landscape, by which it appeals to the human spirit, depends less on its lines and on objects in themselves than on the light and shadow in which it is bathed, and he was the first painter who had the secret of painting these subtle gradations of atmosphere. In his pictures the wind is heard murmuring in the trees, the breeze is felt as it blows over the corn, the sunlight is seen glancing on the leaves and playing on the clear mirror of the waters. Thus Constable for the first time painted nature in all its freshness. His principle of artistic creation is entirely opposed to that which was followed by the Pre-Raphaelites at a later date. Whilst the latter tried to reconstruct a picture of nature by a faithful, painstaking execution of all details—a process by which the expression of the whole usually suffers—Constable’s pictures are broadly and impressively painted, often of rude and brutal force, at times solemn, at times elegant, but always cogent, fresh, and possessing a unity of their own.

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COX.THE SHRIMPERS.

A genius in advance of its age is only first recognised in its full significance when following generations have come abreast with it. And that Constable was made to feel. In 1837 he died in poverty at Hampstead, in the modest “country retreat” where he spent the greatest part of his life. He said that his painting recalled no one, and was neither polished nor pretty, and asked: “How can I hope to be popular? I work only for the future.” And that belonged to him.

Portfolio.
MÜLLER.THE AMPHITHEATRE AT XANTHUS.

Constable’s powerful individuality has brought forth enduring fruit, and helped English landscape painting to attain that noble prime which it enjoyed during the forties and fifties.

With his rich, brilliant, bold, and finely coloured painting, David Cox stands out as perhaps the greatest of Constable’s successors. Like Constable, he was a peasant, and observed nature with the simplicity of one who was country-bred. He was born in 1783, the son of a blacksmith, in a humble spot near Birmingham, and, after a brief sojourn in London, migrated with his family to Hereford, and later to Harborne, also in the neighbourhood of Birmingham. The strip of country which he saw from his house was almost exclusively his field of study. He knew that a painter can pass his life in the same corner of the earth, and that the scene of nature spread before him will never be exhausted. “Farewell, pictures, farewell,” he is reported to have said when he took his last walk, on the day before his death, round the walls of Harborne. He has treated of the manner in which he understood his art in his Treatise on Landscape Painting, written in 1814. His ideal was to see the most cogent effect in nature, and leave everything out which did not harmonise with its character; and in Cox’s pictures it is possible to trace the steps by which he drew nearer to this ideal the more natural he became. The magic of his brush was never more captivating than in the works of his last years, when, fallen victim to a disease of the eye, he could no longer see distinctly and only rendered an impression of the whole scene.

Cox is a great and bold master. The townsman when he first comes into the country, after being imprisoned for months together in a wilderness of brick and mortar, does not begin at once to count the trees, leaves, and the stones lying on the ground. He draws a long breath and exclaims, “What balm!” Cox, too, has not painted details in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites. He represented the soft wind sweeping over the English meadows, the fresh purity of the air, the storms that agitate the landscape of Wales. A delicate silver-grey is spread over most of his pictures, and his method of expression is powerful and nervous. By preference he has celebrated, both in oil-paintings and in boldly handled water-colours, the boundless depths of the sky in its thousand variations of light, now deep blue in broad noon and now eerily gloomy and disturbed. The fame of being the greatest of English water-colour painters is his beyond dispute, yet if he had painted in oils from his youth upwards he would probably have become the most important English landscapist. His small pictures are pure and delicate in colour, and fresh and breezy in atmospheric effect. It is only in large pictures that power is at times denied him. In his later years he began to paint in oils, and in this medium he is a less important artist, though a very great painter. William Müller, who died young, stood as leader at his side.

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DE WINT.NOTTINGHAM.

He was one of the most dexterous amongst the dexterous, next to Turner the greatest adept of English painting. Had he been simpler and quieter he might be called a genius of the first order. But he has sometimes a touch of what is theatrical; it does not always break out, but it does so occasionally. He has an inclination for pageantry, and nothing of that self-sufficiency and quiet tenderness with which Constable and Cox devoted themselves to home scenery. He was at pains to give a trace of largeness and sublimity to modest and unpretentious English landscape, to give to the most familiar subject a tinge of preciosity. His pictures are grandiose in form, and show an admirable lightness of hand, but light and air are wanting in them, the local colour of England and its atmosphere. As a foreigner—he was the son of a Danzig scholar, who had migrated to Bristol—Müller has not seen English landscape with Constable’s native sentiment. He was not content with an English cornfield or an English village; the familiar homeliness of the country in its work-a-day garb excited no emotion in him.