It was not the first brilliant idea which, evolved in England, has had to cross the Channel for due appreciation, for appreciated it certainly was not in the country of its origin. As the genius of the dying Turner flickered out, English art reached its deepest degradation. The official art of the Great Exhibition of 1851 has become a byword and a reproach. In English minds it stands for everything that is insincere, unreal, tawdry, and trivial.
The group of pre-Raphaelites, brilliantly gifted as they undoubtedly were, worked upon a foundation of retrograde mediævalism. And, as the years followed each other, English art failed as a whole to recover its lost vitality. Domestic anecdote, according to the formulæ of Augustus Egg, Poole, or, slightly higher in the scale, Mulready and Maclise, formed the product of nearly every studio. The false Greco-Roman convention of Lord Leighton luckily had no following. Rejuvenescence came from France in the shape of Impressionism, and English art received back an idea she had, as it proved, but lent.
A STUDY · J. CONSTABLE
VIEW OF THE THAMES · THOMAS GIRTIN
Photo by W. A. Mansell & Co.
HENRI IV. AND THE SPANISH AMBASSADOR · R. P. BONINGTON
Those Englishmen who are taunted with following the methods of the French Impressionists, sneered at for imitating a foreign style, are in reality but practising their own, for the French artists simply developed a style which was British in its conception. Many things had assisted this development, some accidental, some natural. All the Englishmen had worked to a large extent in the open. Now the atmosphere of France lends itself admirably to Impressionistic painting “en plein air.” All landscapists notice that the light is purer, stronger, and less variable in France than in England.
By thus working in the open both Constable and Turner, together with their French followers, were able to realise upon canvas a closer verisimilitude to the varying moods of nature than had been attempted before. By avoiding artificially darkened studios they were able to study the problems of light with an actuality impossible under a glass roof. They were in fact children of the sun, and through its worship they evolved an entirely new school of picture-making. The Modern Impressionist, too, is a worshipper of light, and is never happier than when attempting to fix upon his canvas some beautiful effect of sunshine, some exquisite gradation of atmosphere. Who better than Turner can teach the use and practice of value and tone? In triumph he fixed those fleeting mists upon his immortal canvases, immortal unhappily only so long as bitumen, mummy, and other pigment abominations will allow.