It was left to Reynolds to equal if not to surpass Velazquez as well as Rubens and Rembrandt. In a two-page glorification of this English painter we come upon the following panegyric: “There can be no question of placing him by the side of the greatest Venetians or of the triumvirate of the seventeenth century, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez.” If by placing him beside these giants is meant that he in any wise approached their stature, there can be, and has been, outside of England, a very great question of putting him in such company. In fact, his right to such a place has been very definitely denied him. But the unprejudiced opinion of the world matters not to the patriots who edited the Encyclopædia Britannica. That “supreme” English reference work goes on to say that in portraits, such as Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Reynolds “holds the field.... No portrait painter has been more happy in his poses for single figures.” Then, as if such enthusiasm were not enough, we are told that “nature had singled out Sir Joshua to endow him with certain gifts in which he has hardly an equal.”
Nature, it seems, in her singling out process, was particularly partial to Englishmen, for among those other painters who just barely equalled Reynolds’s transcendent genius was Gainsborough. Says the Britannica: “Gainsborough and Reynolds rank side by side.... It is difficult to say which stands the higher of the two.” Consequently hereafter we must place Gainsborough, too, along with Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt and Velazquez! Such a complete revision of æsthetic judgment will, no doubt, be difficult at first, but, by living with the Encyclopædia Britannica and absorbing its British culture, we may in time be able to bracket Michelangelo, Reynolds, Rubens, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Velazquez without the slightest hesitation.
It is difficult to conceive how, in an encyclopædia with lofty educational pretences, extravagance of statement could attain so high a point as that reached in the biographies of Reynolds and Gainsborough. So obviously indefensible are these valuations that I would hesitate to accuse the Britannica’s editors of deliberate falsification—that is, of purposely distorting æsthetic values for the benefit of English artists. Their total lack of discretion indicates an honest, if blind, belief in British æsthetic supremacy. But this fact does not lessen the danger of such judgments to the American public. As a nation we are ignorant of painting and therefore are apt to accept statements of this kind which have the impact of seeming authority behind them.
The same insular and extravagant point of view is discoverable in the article on Turner. To this painter nearly five pages are devoted—a space out of all proportion to the biographies of the other painters of the world. Titian has only three and one-half pages; Rubens has only a little over three pages; and El Greco has less than two-thirds of a page! Of course, it is not altogether fair to base a judgment on space alone; but such startling discrepancies are the rule and not the exception.
In the case of Turner the discrepancy is not only of space, however. In diction, as well, all relative values are thrown to the winds. In the criticism of Turner we find English patriotism at its high-water mark. We read that “the range of his powers was so vast that he covered the whole field of nature and united in his own person the classical and naturalistic schools.” Even this palpable overstatement could be forgiven, since it has a basis of truth, if a little further we did not discover that Turner’s Crossing the Brook in the London National Academy is “probably the most perfect landscape in the world.” In this final and irrevocable judgment is manifest the supreme insular egotism which characterizes nearly all the art articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica. This criticism, to take merely one example, means that Crossing the Brook is more perfect than Rubens’s Landscape with Château de Stein! But the Encyclopædia’s summary of Turner’s genius surpasses in flamboyant chauvinism anything which I have yet seen in print. It is said that, despite any exception we may take to his pictures, “there will still remain a body of work which for extent, variety, truth and artistic taste is like the British fleet among the navies of the world.” Here patriotic fervor has entirely swallowed all restraint.
Over a page is devoted to Constable, in which we are informed that his “vivid tones and fresh color are grafted upon the formulæ of Claude and Rubens.” This type of criticism is not rare. One frequently finds second-rate English artists compared not unfavorably with the great artists of other nations; and it would seem that the English painters add a little touch of their own, the imputation being that they not seldom improve upon their models. Thus Constable adds “vivid tones and fresh colors” to Rubens’s formula. Another instance of this kind is to be found in the case of Alfred Stevens, the British sculptor, not the Belgian painter. (The latter, by the way, though more important and better-known, receives less space than the Englishman.) The vigorous strength of his groups “recalls the style of Michelangelo, but Stevens’s work throughout is original and has a character of its own.” I do not deny that Stevens imitated Michelangelo, but, where English artists are concerned, these relationships are indicated in deceptive phraseology. In the case of French artists, whose biographies are sometimes written by unbiased critics, the truth is not hidden in dictional suavities. Imitation is not made a virtue.
Let us now turn to Watts. Over two pages are accorded him, one page being devoted largely to eulogy, a passage of which reads: “It was the rare combination of supreme handicraft with a great imaginative intellect which secured to Watts his undisputed place in the public estimation of his day.” Furthermore, we hear of “the grandeur and dignity of his style, the ease and purposefulness of his brushwork, the richness and harmoniousness of his coloring.” But those “to whom his exceptional artistic attainment is a sealed book have gathered courage or consolation from the grave moral purpose and deep human sympathy of his teaching.” Here we have a perfect example of the parochial moral uplift which permeates the Britannica’s art criticism. The great Presbyterian complex is found constantly in the judgments of this encyclopædia.
So important a consideration to the Britannica’s critico-moralists is this puritan motif that the fact is actually set down that Millais was devoted to his family! One wonders how much influence this domestic devotion had on the critic who spends a page and a half to tell us of Millais, for not only is this space far in excess of Millais’ importance, but the statement is made that he was “one of the greatest painters of his time,” and that “he could paint what he saw with a force which has seldom been excelled.” Unfortunately the few who excelled him are not mentioned. Perhaps he stood second only to Turner, that super-dreadnought. Surely he was not excelled by Renoir, or Courbet, or Pissarro, or Monet, or Manet, or Cézanne; for these latter are given very little space (the greatest of them having no biography whatever in the Encyclopædia!); and there is no evidence to show that they are considered of more than minor importance.
Perhaps it was Rossetti, a fellow Pre-Raphaelite, who excelled Millais in painting what he saw. Rossetti’s The Song of Solomon, as regards brilliance, finish and the splendor of its lighting, “occupies a great place in the highest grade of modern art of all the world.” Even Holman Hunt, one of the lesser Pre-Raphaelites, is given over a full page, and is spoken of in glowing terms. “Perhaps no painter of the nineteenth century,” we read, “produced so great an impression by a few pictures” as did Hunt; and during the course of the eulogy the critic speaks of Hunt’s “greatness.” Can it be that the naïf gentleman who wrote Hunt’s biography has never heard of Courbet, or Manet, or of the Impressionists, or Cézanne? After so sweeping and unreasoned a statement as the one concerning the great impression made by Hunt’s pictures, such an extreme conclusion is almost inevitable. Or is this critic’s patriotic vanity such that he considers an impression made in England as representative of the world? Even to intimate that the impression made by Hunt’s pictures was comparable to that made by L’Enterrement à Ornans or Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, or that the Pre-Raphaelites possessed even half the importance of Courbet and Manet, is to carry undeserved laudation to preposterous lengths.