A CENTURY OF PAINTING.
NOTES DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL.—A PROVINCIAL SCHOOL OF ART IN ENGLAND.—THE PRECURSOR OF MODERN ART, CONSTABLE.—THE SOLITARY GENIUS OF TURNER.—THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PORTRAITURE.—ROMNEY, OPIE, HOPPNER, AND LAWRENCE.
By Will H. Low.
AT the period when in France David and his followers had resuscitated a dead and gone art, and by dint of governmental patronage had infused into it a semblance of life, across the Channel, in a provincial town of England, a little group of painters were quietly doing work which, if it did not in itself change the face of modern art, was at least indicative of the change soon to be accomplished by the advent of Constable.
The leader of this group, which has been of late years in the hands of zealous amateurs and dealers elevated to the rank of "school," was John Crome, born at Norwich, December 22, 1768. The son of a publican, he was first an errand boy to a local physician and afterwards apprenticed to a sign painter. Without instruction, hampered by an early marriage, he forsook his occupation, and sought to paint landscapes; meanwhile finding in the houses of the neighboring gentry pupils in drawing. The lessons gave him a living; and in the houses where he taught were many Dutch pictures which he carefully studied, so that he is in a sense a follower of the Holland school. But his greatest and best teacher was the quiet Norfolk country; and the environs of Norwich, from which he seldom strayed, found in him an earnest student.
GEORGE ROMNEY, PAINTER OF "THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER," SHOWN ON PAGE 257. FROM A MEDALLION BY THOMAS HALEY.
In 1805, in conjunction with his son (the younger Crome) and Cotman, Stark, and Vincent, Crome founded at Norwich an artists' club, where the members exhibited their pictures and had a large studio in common. Some of the members of the Norwich "school," a title to which none of them in their own time pretended, left their native town, and went to London; but its founder remained true to the city of his birth, where he died April 22, 1821. Late in life he visited Paris, where the Louvre still held the treasures of Europe, garnered after every campaign by Napoleon; and his enthusiasm for the great Dutch painters found fresh nourishment.
It is by this link in the great chain of art that Crome gained his first consideration in the world's esteem; but more important to us of to-day is the fact that he was the first of his century to return to nature. No evil that the frivolous eighteenth century had wrought, or that the classicism of the early years of the nineteenth had perpetuated in art, was so great as the substitution of a conventional type of picture instead of that directly inspired by nature; and this artificial standard, which diverted figure painting from its legitimate field, bore even more heavily on the art of landscape painting.