HERKOMER.Mag. of Art.
THE LAST MUSTER.
(By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the picture.)

Cassell & Co.
HERKOMER.FOUND.

Of course, all the influences which have affected English art in other respects are likewise reflected in landscape painting. The epoch-making activity of the pre-Raphaelites, the passionate earnestness of Ruskin’s love for nature, as well as the influence of foreign art, have all left their traces. In his own manner Constable had spoken the last word. The principal thing in him, as in Cox, was the study of atmospheric effects and of the dramatic life of air. They neither of them troubled themselves about local colour, but sought to render the tones which are formed under atmospheric and meteorological influences; they altogether sacrificed the completion of the details of subject to seizing the momentary impression. In Turner, generally speaking, it was only the air that lived. Trees and buildings, rocks and water, are merely repoussoirs for the atmosphere; they are exclusively ordained to lead the eye through the mysterious depths of light and shadow. The intangible absorbed what could be touched and handled. As a natural reaction there came this pre-Raphaelite landscape, and by a curious irony of chance the writer who had done most for Turner’s fame was also he who first welcomed this pre-Raphaelite landscape school. Everything which the old school had neglected now became the essential object of painting. The landscape painters fell in love with the earth, with the woods and the fields; and the more autumn resolved the wide green harmony of nature into a sport of colours multiplied a thousand times, the more did they love it. Thousands of things were there to be seen. First, how the foliage turned yellow and red and brown, and then how it fell away: how it was scattered upon a windy day, whirling in a yellow drift of leaves; how in still weather leaf after leaf lightly rustled to the ground from between the wavering brown boughs. And then when the foliage fell from the trees and bushes the most inviolate secrets of summer came to light; there lay around quantities of bright seeds and berries rich in colour, brown nuts, smooth acorns, black and glossy sloes, and scarlet haws. In the leafless beeches there clustered pointed beechmast, the mugwort bent beneath its heavy red bunches, late blackberries lay black and brown amid the damp foliage upon the road, bilberries grew amid the heather, and wild raspberries bore their dull red fruit once again. The dying ferns took a hundred colours; the moss shot up like the ears of a miniature cornfield. Eager as children the landscape painters roamed here and there across the woodland, to discover its treasures and its curiosities. They understood how to paint a bundle of hay with such exactness that a botanist could decide upon the species of every blade. One of them lived for three months under canvas, so as thoroughly to know a landscape of heath. Confused through detail, they lost their view of the whole, and only made a return to modernity when they came to study the Parisian landscape painters. Thus English art in this matter made a curious circuit, giving and taking. First, the English fertilised French art; but at the time when French artists stood under the influence of the English, the latter swerved in the opposite direction, until they ultimately received from France the impulse which led them back into the old way.

In accordance with these different influences, several currents which cross and mingle with each other are to be found flowing side by side in English landscape painting: upon one side a spirit of prosaic reasonableness, a striving after clearness and precision, which does not know how to sacrifice detail, and is therefore wanting in pictorial totality of effect; on the other side an artistic pantheism which rises at times to high lyrical poetry in spite of many dissonances.

The pictures of Cecil Lawson lead to the point where the pre-Raphaelites begin. The elder painters, with their powerful treatment and the freedom and boldness of their execution, still keep altogether on the lines of Constable, whereas in later painters, with their minute elaboration of all particularities, the influence of the pre-Raphaelites becomes more and more apparent.

Where Cecil Lawson ended, James Clarke Hook began, the great master-spirit who opened the eyes of the world fifty years ago to the depth of colouring and the enchanting life of nature, even in its individual details. His pictures, especially those sunsets which he paints with such delight, have something devout and religious in them; they have the effect of a prayer or a hymn, and often possess a solemnity which is entirely biblical, in spite of their brusque, pungent colours. In his later period he principally devoted himself to sea-pieces, and in doing so receded from the pre-Raphaelite painting of detail, which is characteristic of his youthful period. His pictures give one the breath of the sea, and his sailors are old sea-wolves. All that remains from his pre-Raphaelite period is that, as a rule, they carry a certain burden of ideas.

Vicat Cole, likewise one of the older school, is unequal and less important. From many of his pictures one receives the impression that he has directly copied Constable, and others are bathed in dull yellow tones; nevertheless he has sometimes painted autumn pictures, felicitous and noble landscapes, in which there is really a reflection of the sun of Claude Lorrain.