ALBERT MOORE.Scribner.
READING ALOUD.
(By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture.)

Two masters who died young and have a peculiarly captivating individuality, George Mason and Fred Walker, stand at the head of this, the most novel phase of English painting. Alike in the misfortune of premature death, they are also united by a bond of sympathy in their taste and sentiment. If there be truth in what Théophile Gautier once said in a beautiful poem, “Tout passe, l’art robuste seul a l’éternité,” neither of them will enter the kingdom of immortality. That might be applied to them which Heine said of Leopold Robert: they have purified the peasant in the purgatory of their art, so that nothing but a glorified body remains. As the pre-Raphaelites wished to give exquisite precision to the world of dream, Walker and Mason have taken this precision from the world of reality, endowing it with a refined subtlety which in truth it does not possess. Their pictures breathe only of the bloom and essence of things, and in them nature is deprived of her strength and marrow, and painting of her peculiar qualities, which are changed into coloured breath and tinted dream. They may be reproached with an excess of nervous sensibility, an effort after style by which modern truth is recast, a morbid tendency towards suave mysticism. Nevertheless their works are the most original products of English painting during the last thirty years, and by a strange union of realism and poetic feeling they have exercised a deeply penetrative influence upon Continental art.

“Æquam semper in rebus arduis servare mentem” might be chosen as a motto for George Mason’s biography. Brought up in prosperous circumstances, he first became a doctor, but when he was seven-and-twenty he went to Italy to devote himself to painting; here he received the news that he was ruined. His father had lost everything, and he found himself entirely deprived of means, so that his life became a long struggle against hunger. He bound himself to dealers, and provided animal pieces by the dozen for the smallest sums. In a freezing room he sat with his pockets empty, worked until it was dark, and crept into bed when Rome went to feast. After two years, however, he had at last saved the money necessary for taking him back to England, and he settled with his young wife in Wetley Abbey. This little village, where he lived his simple life in the deepest seclusion, became for him what Barbizon had been for Millet. He wandered by himself amongst the fields, and painted the valleys of Wetley with the tenderness of feeling with which Corot painted the outskirts of Fontainebleau. He saw the ghostly mists lying upon the moors, saw the peasants returning from the plough and the reapers from the field, noted the children, in their life so closely connected with the change of nature. And yet his peasant pictures more resemble the works of Perugino than those of Bastien-Lepage. The character of their landscape is to some extent responsible for this. For the region he paints, in its lyrical charm, has kinship with the hills in the pictures of Perugino. Here there grow the same slender trees upon a delicate, undulating soil. But the silent, peaceful, and resigned human beings who move across it have also the tender melancholy of Umbrian Madonnas. Mason’s realism is merely specious; it consists in the external point of costume. There are really no peasants of such slender growth, no English village maidens with such rosy faces and such coquettish Holland caps. Mason divests them of all the heaviness of earth, takes, as it were, only the flower-dust from reality. The poetic grace of Jules Breton might be recalled, were it not that Mason works with more refinement and subtlety, for his idealism was unconscious, and never resulted in an empty, professional painting of beauty.

CALDECOTT.Brothers, photo.
THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)

When he painted his finest pictures he suffered from very bad health, and his works have themselves the witchery of disease, the fascinating beauty of consumption. He painted with such delicacy and refinement, because sickness had made him weak and delicate; he divested his peasant men and women of everything fleshly, so that nothing but a shadow of them remained, a spirit vibrating in fine, elusive, dying chords. In his “Evening Hymn” girls are singing in the meadow; to judge from their dresses, they should be the daughters of the peasantry, but one fancies them religious enthusiasts, brought together upon this mysterious and sequestered corner of the earth by a melancholy world-weariness, by a yearning after the mystical. Fragile as glass, sensitive to the ends of their fingers, and, one might say, morbidly spiritual, they breathe out their souls in song, encompassed by the soft shadows of the evening twilight, and uttering all the exquisite tenderness of their subtle temperament in the hymn they chant. Another of his pastoral symphonies is “The Harvest Moon.” Farm labourers are plodding homewards after their day’s work. The moon is rising, and casts its soft, subdued light upon the dark hills and the slender trees, in the silvery leaves of which the evening wind is playing. “The Gander,” “The Young Anglers,” and “The Cast Shoe” are captivating through the same delicacy and the same mood of peaceful resignation. George Mason is an astonishing artist, almost always guilty of exaggeration, but always seductive. Life passes in his pictures like a beautiful summer’s day, and with the accompaniment of soft music. A peaceful, delicate feeling, something mystical, bitter-sweet, and suffering, lives beneath the light and tender veil of his pictures. They affect the nerves like a harmonica, and lull one with low and softly veiled harmonies. Many of the melancholy works of Israels have a similar effect, only Israels is less refined, has less of distinction and—more of truth.

MASON.THE END OF THE DAY.
(By gracious permission of H.M. Queen Victoria, the owner of the picture.)

This suavity of feeling is characteristic in an almost higher degree of Fred Walker, a sensitive artist never satisfied with himself. Every one of his pictures gives the impression of deep and quiet reverie; everywhere a kind of mood, like that in a fairy tale, colours the ordinary events of life in his works, an effect produced by his refined composition of forms and colours. In his classically simple art Mason was influenced by the Italians, and especially the Umbrians. Walker drew a similar inspiration from the works of Millet. Both the Englishman and the Frenchman died in the same year, the former on 20th January 1875, in Barbizon, the latter on 5th June, in Scotland; and yet in a certain sense they stand at the very opposite poles of art. Walker is graceful, delicate, and tender; Millet forceful, healthy, and powerful. “To draw sublimity from what is trivial” was the aim of both, and they both reached it by the same path. All their predecessors had held truth as the foe of beauty, and had qualified shepherds and shepherdesses, ploughmen and labourers, for artistic treatment by forcing upon them the smiling grace and the strained humour of genre painting. Millet and Fred Walker broke with the frivolity of this elder school of painting, which had seen matter for jesting, and only that, in the life of the rustic; they asserted that in the life of the toiler nothing was more deserving of artistic representation than his toil. They always began by reproducing life as they saw it, and by disdaining, in their effort after truth, all artificial embellishment; they came to recognise, both of them at the same time, a dignity in the human frame, and grandiose forms and classic lines in human movement, which no one had discovered before. With the most pious reverence for the exact facts of life, there was united that greatness of conception which is known as style.