L’Art.
BONINGTON.THE WINDMILL OF SAINT-JOUIN.

Something in Müller’s imagination, which caused him to love decided colours and sudden contrasts rather than delicate gradations, attracted him to Southern climes. His natural place was in the East, which had not at that time been made the vogue. Here, like Decamps and Marilhat, he found those vivid rather than delicate effects which appealed to his eye. He was twice in the South—the first time in Athens and Egypt in 1838, and once again in Smyrna, Rhodes, and Lycia in 1843-44. In the year during which he had yet to live he collected those Oriental pictures which form his legacy, containing the best that he did. Certain of them, such as “The Amphitheatre at Xanthus,” are painted with marvellous verve; they are not the work of a day, but of an hour. All these mountain castles upon abrupt cliffs, these views of the Acropolis and of Egypt, are real masterpieces of broad painting, their colour clear and their light admirable. Not one of the many Frenchmen who were in the South at this time has represented its sunshine and its brilliant atmosphere with such flattering, voluptuous tones.

Peter de Wint, who was far more true and simple, was, like Constable and Cox, entirely wedded to his own birthplace. At any rate, his sojourn in France lasted only for a short time, and left no traces in his art. From youth to age he was the painter of England in its work-a-day garb—of the low hills of Surrey, of the plains of Lincolnshire, or of the dark canals of the Thames, which he specially portrayed in unsurpassable water-colour paintings. His ancestor in art is Philips de Koning, the pupil of Rembrandt, the master of Dutch plains and wide horizons.

Studio.
BONINGTON.   READING ALOUD.

After Cox and de Wint came Creswick, more laborious, more patient, more studious of detail, furnished perhaps with a sharper eye for the green tones of nature, though with less feeling for atmosphere. It cannot be said that he advanced art, but merely that he added a regard for light and sunshine, unknown to the period before 1820, to the study of Hobbema and Waterloo. With those who would not have painted as they did but for Constable, Peter Graham and Dawson may be likewise ranked; and these artists peculiarly devoted themselves to the study of sky and water. Henry Dawson painted the most paltry and unpromising places—a reach of the Thames close to London, or a quarter in the smoky precincts of Dover, or Greenwich; but he painted them with a power such as only Constable possessed. In particular he is unequalled in his masterly painting of clouds. Constable had seldom done this in the same way. He delighted in an agitated sky, in clouds driven before the wind and losing their form in indeterminate contours; in nature he saw merely reflections of his own restless spirit, striving after colour and movement. Dawson painted those clouds which stand firm in the sky like piles of building—cloud-cathedrals, as Ruskin has called them. There are pictures of his consisting of almost nothing but great clouds. But that wide space, the earth, which our eyes regard as their own peculiar domain, is wanting. Colours and forms are nowhere to be seen, but only clouds and undulating yellowish mist in which objects vanish like pallid spectres. John Linnell carried the traditions of this great era on to the new period: at first revelling in golden light, in sunsets and rosy clouds of dusk, and at a later time, in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, bent on the precise execution of bodily form.

The young master, who died at twenty-seven, Richard Parkes Bonington, unites these English classic masters with the French. An Englishman by birth and origin, but trained as a painter in France, where he had gone when fifteen years of age, he seems from many points of view one of the most gracious products of the Romantic movement in France, though at the same time he has qualities over which only the English had command at that period, and not the French. He entered Gros’s studio in France, which was then the favourite meeting-place of all the younger men of revolutionary tendencies, but repeated journeys to London did not allow him to forget Constable. In Normandy and Picardy he painted his first landscapes, following them up with a series of Venetian sea-pieces and little historical scenes. Then consumption seized him and took but a brief time in striking him down. On 23rd September 1828 he died in London, whither he had gone to consult a specialist. In consequence of his early death his talent never ripened, but he was a simple, natural, pure, and congenial artist for all that. “I knew him well and loved him much. His English composure, which nothing could disturb, robbed him of none of the qualities which make life pleasant. When I first came across him I was myself very young, and was making studies in the Louvre. It was about 1816 or 1817. He was in the act of copying a Flemish landscape—a tall youth who had grown rapidly. He had already an astonishing dexterity in water-colours, which were then an English novelty. Some which I saw later at a dealer’s were charming, both in colour and composition. Other modern artists are perhaps more powerful and more accurate than Bonington, but no one in this modern school, perhaps no earlier artist, possessed the ease of execution which makes his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular representation of nature. And the same is true of the costume pictures which he painted later. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling at his sense of effect, and his great ease of execution. Not that he was quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. But his dexterity was so great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects, which were as charming as the first.” With these words his friend and comrade, the great Eugène Delacroix, drew the portrait of Bonington. Bonington was at once the most natural and the most delicate in that Romantic school in which he was one of the first to make an appearance. He had a fine eye for the charm of nature, saw grace and beauty in her everywhere, and represented the spring and the sunshine in bright and clear tones. No Frenchman before him has so painted the play of light on gleaming costumes and succulent meadow grasses. Even his lithographs from Paris and the provinces are masterpieces of spirited, impressionist observation—qualities which he owed, not to Gros, but to Constable. He was the first to communicate the knowledge of the great English classic painters to the youth of France, and they of Barbizon and Ville d’Avray continued to spin the threads which connect Constable with the present.

RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON.

CHAPTER XXV