Such a painter-poet of the specifically English type is Briton-Rivière. He is a painter of animals, and as such one of the greatest of the century. Lions and geese, royal tigers and golden eagles, stags, dogs, foxes, Highland cattle, he has painted them all, and with a mastery which has nothing like it except in Landseer. Amongst the painters of animals he stands alone through his power of conception and his fine poetic vein, while in all his pictures he unites the greatest simplicity with enormous dramatic force. Accessory work is everywhere kept within the narrowest limits, and everywhere the character of the animals is magnificently grasped. He does not alone paint great tragic scenes as Barye chiselled them, for he knows that beasts of prey are usually quiet and peaceable, and only now and then obey their savage nature. Moreover, he never attempts to represent animals performing a masquerade of humanity in their gestures and expression, as Landseer did, nor does he transform them into comic actors. He paints them as what they are, a symbol of what humanity was once itself, with its elemental passions and its natural virtues and failings. Amongst all animal painters he is almost alone in resisting the temptation to give the lion a consciousness of his own dignity, the tiger a consciousness of his own savageness, the dog a consciousness of his own understanding. They neither pose nor think about themselves. In addition to this he has a powerful and impressive method, and a deep and earnest scheme of colour. In the beginning of his career he learnt most from James Ward. Later he felt the influence of the refined, chivalrous, and piquant Scotchmen Orchardson and Pettie. But the point in which Briton-Rivière is altogether peculiar is that in which he joins issue with the painters influenced by Greece: he introduces his animals into a scene where there are men of the ancient world.

Briton-Rivière is descended from a French family which found its way into England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he is one of those painters—so frequent in English art—whose nature has developed early: when he was fourteen he left school, exhibited in the Academy when he was eighteen, painted as a pre-Raphaelite between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and graduated at Oxford at seven-and-twenty. In his youth he divided his time between art and scholarship—painting pictures and studying Greek and Latin literature. Thus he became a painter of animals, having also an enthusiasm for the Greek poets, and he has stood for a generation as an uncontested lord and master on his own peculiar ground. In his first important picture, of 1871, the comrades of Ulysses, changed into swine, troop grunting round the enchantress Circe. In the masterpiece of 1872 the Prophet Daniel stands unmoved and submissive to the will of God amid the lions roaring and showing their teeth, ready to spring upon him in their hunger, yet regarding him with a mysterious fear, spellbound by the power of his eye; while his great picture “Persepolis” makes the appeal of a page from the philosophy of history, with its lions roaming majestically amid the ruins of human grandeur and human civilisation, which are flooded with moonlight. The picture “In Manus Tuas, Domine,” showed St. George riding solitary through the lonely and silent recesses of a primitive forest upon a pale white horse. He is armed in mail and has a mighty sword; a deep seriousness is imprinted on his features, for he has gone forth to slay the dragon. In yet another picture, “An Old-World Wanderer,” a man of the early ages has come ashore upon an untrodden island, and is encompassed by flocks of great white birds, fluttering round him with curiosity and confidence, as yet ignorant of the fear of human beings. The picture of 1891, “A Mighty Hunter before the Lord,” is one of his most poetic night-pieces: Nimrod is returning home, and beneath the silvery silence of the moon the dead and dying creatures which he has laid low upon the wide Assyrian plain are tended and bemoaned by their mates.

ALBERT MOORE.COMPANIONS.
(By permission of Messrs. Dowdeswell & Dowdeswells, the owners of the copyright.)

Between whiles he painted subjects which were not borrowed from ancient history, illustrating the friendship between man and dog, as Landseer had done before him. For instance, in “His Only Friend” there is a poor lad who has broken down at the last milestone before the town and is guarded by his dog. In “Old Playfellows,” again, one of the playmates is a child, who is sick and leans back quietly in an armchair covered with cushions. His friend the great dog has one paw resting on the child’s lap, and looks up with a pensive expression, such as Landseer alone had previously painted. But in this style he reached his highest point in “Sympathy.” No work of Briton-Rivière’s has become more popular than this picture of the little maiden who has forgotten her key and is sitting helpless before the house-door, consoled by the dog who has laid his head upon her shoulder.

Scribner.Scribner.
ALBERT MOORE.YELLOW MARGUERITES.ALBERT MOORE.WAITING TO CROSS.
(By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture.)(By permission of Lord Davey, the owner of the picture.)

Since the days of Reynolds English art has shown a most vivid originality in such representations of children. English picture-books for children are in these days the most beautiful in the world, and the marvellous fairy-tales and fireside stories of Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway have made their way throughout the whole Continent. How well these English draughtsmen know the secret of combining truth with the most exquisite grace! How touching are these pretty babies, how angelically innocent these little maidens! Frank eyes, blue as the flowers of the periwinkle, gaze at you with no thought of their being looked at in return. The naïve astonishment of the little ones, their frightened mien, their earnest look absently fixed upon the sky, the first tottering steps of a tiny child and the mobile grace of a schoolgirl, all are rendered in these prints with the most tender intimacy of feeling. And united with this there is a delicate and entirely modern sentiment for scenery, for the fascination of bare autumn landscapes robbed of their foliage, for sunbeams and the budding fragrance of spring. Everything is idyllic, poetic, and touched by a congenial breath of tender melancholy.

And this aerial quality, this delicacy and innocent grace and tenderness, is not confined alone to such representations of children, but is peculiar to English painting. Even when perfectly ordinary subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical. The painter seldom paints merely for the joy of painting, and the numberless technical questions which play such an important part in French art are here only of secondary importance. It accords with the character and taste of the people that their artists have rather a poetic design than one which is properly pictorial. The conception is sometimes allegorical and subtle to the most exquisite fineness of point, sometimes it is vitiated by sentimentality, but it is never purely naturalistic; and this qualified realism, this realism with a poetic strain to keep it ladylike, set English art, especially in the years when Bastien-Lepage and Roll were at their zenith, in sharp opposition to the art of France. In those days the life-size artisan picture, the prose of life, and the struggle for existence reigned almost exclusively in the Parisian Salon, whereas in the Royal Academy everything was quiet and cordial; an intimate, inoffensive, and heartfelt cheerfulness was to be found in the pictures upon its walls, as if none of these painters knew of the existence of such a place as Whitechapel. A connection between pictures and poems is still popular, and some touching trait, some tender episode, some expression of softness, is given to subjects drawn from the ordinary life of the people. Painters seek in every direction after pretty rustic scenes, moving incidents, or pure emotions. Instead of being harsh and rugged in their sense of truth and passion, they glide lightly away from anything ugly, bringing together the loveliest and most beautiful things in nature, and creating elegies, pastorals, and idylls from the passing events of life. Their method of expression is fastidious and finished to a nicety; their vision of life is smiling and kindly, though it must not be supposed that their optimism has now anything in common with the genre picture of 1850. The genre painters from Wilkie to Collins epitomised the actual manners of the present in prosaic compositions. But here the most splendid poetry breaks out, as indeed it actually does in the midst of ordinary life. If in that earlier period English painting was awkward in narration, vulgar, and didactic, it is now tasteful, refined, beautiful, and of distinction. The philistinism of the pictures of those days has been finally stripped away, and the humorously anecdotic genre entirely overcome. The generation of tiresome narrative artists has been followed by painter-poets of delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling.