Mag. of Art.Brothers, photo.
LUKE FILDES.VENETIAN WOMEN.STANHOPE FORBES.THE LIGHTHOUSE.
(By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co.,the owners of the copyright.)(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the ownersof the picture.)

Of course, England has a great part to play in the painting of the sea. It is not for nothing that a nation occupies an insular and maritime position, above all with such a sea and upon such coasts, and the English painter knows well how to give an heroic and poetic cast to the weather-beaten features of the sailor. For thirty years Henry Moore, the elder brother of Albert Moore, was the undisputed monarch of this province of art. Moore began as a landscape painter. From 1853 to 1857 he painted the glistening cliffs and secluded nooks of Cumberland, and then the green valleys of Switzerland flooded with the summer air and the clear morning light—quiet scenes of rustic life, the toil of the wood-cutter and the haymaker, somewhat as Julien Dupré handles such matters at the present time in Paris. From 1858 he began his conquest of the sea, and in the succeeding interval he painted it in all the phases of its changing life,—at times in grey and sombre morning, at other times when the sun stands high; at times in quietude, at other times when the wind sweeps heavily across the waves, when the storm rises or subsides, when the sky is clouded or when it brightens. It is a joy to follow him in all quarters of the world, to see how he constantly studies the waves of every zone on fair or stormy days, amid the clearness and brilliancy of the mirror of the sea, as amid the strife of the elements; as a painter he is, at the same time, always a student of nature, and treats the sea as though he had to paint its portrait. In the presence of his sea-pieces one has the impression of a window opening suddenly upon the ocean. Henry Moore measures the boundless expanse quite calmly, like a captain calculating the chances of being able to make a crossing. Nowhere else does there live any painter who regards the sea so much with the eyes of a sailor, and who combines such eminent qualities with this objective and cool, attentive observation, which seems to behold in the sea merely its navigable capacity.

The painter of the river-port of London and the arm of the Thames is William L. Wyllie, whose pictures unite so much bizarre grandeur with so much precision. One knows the port life of the Thames, with its accumulation of work, which has not its like upon the whole planet. Everything is colossal. From Greenwich up to London both sides of the river are a continuous quay: everywhere there are goods being piled, sacks being raised on pulleys, ships being laid at anchor; everywhere are fresh storehouses for copper, beer, sails, tar, and chemicals. The river is of great width, and is like a street populated with ships, a workshop winding again and again. The steamers and sailing vessels move up and down stream, or lie in masses, close beside one another, at anchor. Upon the bank the docks lie athwart like so many streets of water, sending out ships or taking them in. The ranks of masts and the slender rigging form a spider’s web spreading across the whole horizon; and a vaporous haze, penetrated by the sun, envelops it with a reddish veil. Every dock is like a town, filled with huge vats and populated with a swarm of human beings, that move hither and thither amid fluttering shadows. This vast panorama, veiled with smoke and mist, only now and then broken by a ray of sunlight, is the theme of Wyllie’s pictures. Even as a child he ran about in the port of London, clambered on to the ships, noted the play of the waves, and wandered about the docks; and so he painted his pictures afterwards with all the technical knowledge of a sailor. There is no one who knows so well how ships stand in the water; no one has such an understanding of their details: the heavy sailing vessels and the great steamers, which lie in the brown water of the port like mighty monsters, the sailors and the movements of the dock labourers, the dizzy tide of men, the confusion of cabs and drays upon the bridges spanning the arm of the Thames; only Vollon in Paris is to be compared with him as painter of a river-port.

R. ANNING BELL.OBERON AND TITANIA WITH THEIR TRAIN.

Apart from him, Clara Montalba specially has painted the London port in delicate water-colours. Yet she is almost more at home in Venice, the Venice of Francesco Guardi, with its magic gleam, its canals, regattas, and palaces, the Oriental and dazzling splendour of San Marco, the austere grace of San Giorgio Maggiore, the spirited and fantastic décadence of Santa Maria della Salute. Elsewhere English water-colour often enters into a fruitless rivalry with oil-painting, but Clara Montalba cleaves to the old form which in other days under Bonington, David Cox, and Turner was the chief glory of the English school. She throws lightly upon paper notes and effects which have struck her, and the memory of which she wishes to retain.

For the English painters of the day, so far as they do not remain in the country, Venice has become what the East was for the earlier generations. They no longer study the romantic Venice which Turner painted and Byron sang in Childe Harold, they do not paint the noble beauty of Venetian architecture or its canals glowing in the sun, but the Venice of the day, with its narrow alleys and pretty girls, Venice with its marvellous effects of light and the picturesque figures of its streets. Nor are they at pains to discover “ideal” traits in the character of the Italian people. They paint true, everyday scenes from popular life, but these are glorified by the magic of light. After Zezzos, Ludwig Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Tito, and Eugène Blaas, the Englishmen Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, and Henry Woods are the most skilful painters of Venetian street scenes. In the pictures of Luke Fildes and W. Logsdail there are usually to be seen in the foreground beautiful women, painted life-size, washing linen in the canal or seated knitting at the house door; the heads are bright and animated, the colours almost glaringly vivid. Henry Woods, the brother-in-law of Luke Fildes, rather followed the paths prescribed by Favretto in such pictures as “Venetian Trade in the Streets,” “The Sale of an Old Master,” “Preparation or the First Communion,” “Back from the Rialto,” and the like; of all the English he has carried out the study of bright daylight most consistently. The little glass house which he built in 1879 at the back of the Palazzo Vendramin became the model of all the glass studios now disseminated over the city of the lagunes.

And these labours in Venice contributed in no unessential manner to lead English painting, in general, away from its one-sided æsthetics and rather more into the mud of the streets, caused it to break with its finely accorded tones, and brought it to a more earnest study of light. Beside his idealised Venetian women, Luke Fildes also painted large pictures from the life of the English people, such as “The Return of the Lost One,” “The Widower,” and the like, which struck tones more earnest than English painting does elsewhere; and in his picture of 1878, “The Poor of London,” he even recalled certain sketches which Gavarni drew during his rambles through the poverty-stricken quarter of London. The poor starving figures in this work were rendered quite realistically and without embellishment; the general tone was a greenish-grey, making a forcible change from the customary light blue of English pictures. Dudley Hardy’s huge picture “Homeless,” where a crowd of human beings are sleeping at night in the open air at the foot of a monument in London, and Jacomb Hood’s plain scenes from London street life, are other works which in recent years were striking, from having a character rather French than English. Stott of Oldham, by his pretty pictures of the dunes with children playing, powerful portraits, and delicate, vaporous moonlight landscapes, has won many admirers on the Continent also. Stanhope Forbes painted “A Philharmonic Society in the Country,” a representation of an auction, and scenes from the career of the Salvation Army, in which he restrained himself from all subordinate ideas of a poetic turn.