2. Hogarth—Choice of subjects and manner of treatment. Influence of the Dutch school. Reasons for the great popularity of his work among the English. Historical value. Interest rather than beauty. Engravings. Pictures in the British Museum.
3. Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney—The portrait painters of the eighteenth century. Well-known pictures of women and children: the Duchess of Devonshire, Cherry Ripe, The Strawberry Girl, etc. Reynolds' school for painting. Readings from his Discourses.
4. Raeburn and Wilkie—Subjects from humble life. The sentimental story as a theme. Scottish emotionalism in art and in literature; Wilkie's Blind Man's Buff and The Blind Fiddler.
5. Constable—Great painter of English landscape. Intense sympathy with his subject. Appreciation of the artistic value of mists, clouds, and showers. Effect on modern French landscape painters. Great commercial value of Constable's pictures to-day. Paintings in the National Gallery, at South Kensington and in the Metropolitan Museum.
6. Turner—Greatest English landscape painter. Strange story of his life. His eccentricities. Style of his painting. Comparison with Claude and Poussin. Unfortunate choice of pigments and consequent fading of his pictures. Readings from Ruskin's Modern Painters.
Books to Consult—Gleeson White: Master Painters of Britain. Spielmann: British Portrait Painting to the Closing of the XIX Century. Allan Cunningham: Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors. Horace Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England.
This program is so full that it may easily be divided between two meetings. Notice beside the artists mentioned those of less distinction: Sir Thomas Lawrence, the portrait painter belonging to the Reynolds school; Blake, the mystical and symbolical artist who influenced the later pre-Raphaelites; and Landseer, the painter of animals (who may be compared with Rosa Bonheur). Illustrate the paper with photographs as far as possible.
IX—ENGLAND (PART II)
1. The Pre-Raphaelites—Their origin and principles: sincerity and truth to nature. Holman Hunt: Light of the World; The Triumph of the Innocents. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Ecce Ancilla Domini; Beata Beatrix. Photographs of these pictures may be shown, and those who have seen them may give their impression of them.
2. The Academicians—Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir J. E. Millais and his desertion of the Pre-Raphaelites, G. F. Watts, Sir Alma Tadema, Frank Dicksee, Sir E. J. Poynter, Sir Luke Fildes, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Sir W. Q. Orchardson. In this connection there may be a reading from Herkomer's memoir.