LAWSON.Brothers, photo.
THE MINISTER’S GARDEN.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)

With much greater freedom does Colin Hunter approach nature, and he has the secret of seizing her boldly in her most impressive moments. The twilight, with its mysterious, interpenetrating tremor of colours of a thousand shades, its shine and glimmer of water, with the sky brooding heavily above, is what fascinates him most of all. Sometimes he represents the dawn, as in “The Herring Market at Sea”; sometimes the pale tawny sunset, as in “The Gatherers of Seaweed,” in the South Kensington Museum. His men are always in a state of restless activity, whether they are making the most of the last moments of light or facing the daybreak with renewed energies.

COLIN HUNTER.Brothers, photo.
THE HERRING MARKET AT SEA.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)

Although resident in London, he and Hook are the true standard-bearers of the forcible Scotch school of landscape. MacCallum, MacWhirter, and James Macbeth, with whom John Brett, the landscape painter of Cornwall, may be associated, are all gnarled, Northern personalities. Their strong, dark tones stand often beside each other with a little hardness, but they sum up the great glimpses of nature admirably. Their brush has no tenderness, their spirit does not lightly yield to dreaminess, but they stand with both feet firmly planted on the earth, and they clasp reality in a sound and manly fashion with both arms. Their deep-toned pictures, with red wooden houses, darkly painted vessels, veiled skies, and rude fishermen with all their heart in their work, waken strong and intimate emotions. The difference between these Scots and the tentative spirits of the younger generation of the following of Walker and Mason is like that between Rousseau and Dupré as opposed to Chintreuil and Daubigny. The Scotch painters are sombre and virile; they have an accent of depth and truth, and a dark, ascetic harmony of colour. Even as landscape painters the English love what is delicate in nature, what is refined and tender, familiar and modest: blossoming apple-trees and budding birches, the odour of the cowshed and the scent of hay, the chime of sheep-bells and the hum of gnats. They seek no great emotions, but are merely amiable and kindly, and their pictures give one the feeling of standing at the window upon a country excursion, and looking out at the laughing and budding spring. In her novel North and South Mrs. Gaskell has given charming expression to the glow of this feeling of having fled from the smoke and dirt of industrial towns to breathe the fresh air and see the sun go down in the prosperous country, where the meadows are fresh and well-kept, and where the flowers are fragrant and the leaves glisten in the sunshine. In the pictures of the Scotch artists toiling men are moving busily; for the English, nature merely exists that man may have his pleasure in her. Not only is everything which renders her the prosaic handmaiden of mankind scrupulously avoided, but all abruptnesses of landscape, all the chance incidents of mountain scenery; and, indeed, they are not of frequent occurrence in nature as she is in England. A familiar corner of the country is preferred to wide prospects, and some quiet phase to nature in agitation. Soft, undulating valleys, gently spreading hills conforming to the Hogarthian line of beauty, are especially favoured. And should the rainbow, the biblical symbol of atonement, stand in the sky, the landscape is for English eyes in the zenith of its beauty.

AUMONIER.Brothers, photo.
THE SILVER LINING TO THE CLOUD.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)
Cassell & Co.
COLIN HUNTER.THEIR ONLY HARVEST.
HENRY MOORE.Brothers, photo.
MOUNT’S BAY.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)

There is Birket Forster, one of the first and most energetic followers of Walker—Birket Forster, whose charming woodcuts became known in Germany likewise; Inchbold, who with a light hand combines the tender green of the grasses upon the dunes and the bright blue of the sea into a whole pervaded with light, and of great refinement; Leader, whose bright evening landscapes, and Corbet, whose delicate moods of morning, are so beautiful. Mark Fisher, who in the matter of tones closely follows the French landscape school, though he remains entirely English in sentiment, has painted with great artistic power the dreamy peace of solitary regions as well as the noisy and busy life of the purlieus of the town. John White, in 1882, signalised himself with a landscape, “Gold and Silver,” which was bathed in light and air. The gold was a waving cornfield threaded by a sandy little yellow path; the silver was the sea glittering and sparkling in the background. Moved by Birket Forster, Ernest Parton seeks to combine refinement of tone with incisiveness in the painting of detail. His motives are usually quite simple—a stream and a birch wood in the dusk, a range of poplars stretching dreamily along the side of a ditch. Marshall painted gloomy London streets enveloped in mist; Docharty blossoming hawthorn bushes and autumn evening with russet-leaved oaks; while Alfred East became the painter of spring in all its fragrance, when the meadows are resplendent in their earliest verdure, and the leaves of the trees which have just unfolded stand out against the firmament in light green patches of colour, when the limes are blossoming and the crops begin to sprout. M. J. Aumonier appears in the harmony of colouring, and in the softness of his fine, light-hued tones, as the true heir of Walker and Mason. A discreet and intimate sense of poetry pervades his valleys with their veiled and golden light, a fertile odour of the earth streams from his rich meadows, and from all the luxuriant, cultivated, and peacefully idyllic tracts which he has painted so lovingly and so well. Gregory, Knight, Alfred Parsons, David Fulton, A. R. Brown, and St. Clair Simmons have all something personal in their work, a bashful tenderness beneath what is seemingly arid. The study of water-colour would alone claim a chapter for itself. Since water-colour allows of more breadth and unity than oil-painting, it is precisely here that there may be found exceedingly charming and discreet concords, softly chiming tones of delicate blue, greenish, and rosy light, giving the most refined sensations produced by English colouring.