GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
MRS. SIDDONS AS THE TRAGIC MUSE
P>
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS
From the Painting in the Dulivich Gallery
GREAT
ENGLISH PAINTERS
BY
FRANCIS DOWNMAN
WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS
X
/'
PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY W. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PLYMOUTH, 1908
CONTENTS
PAGE
HOGARTH ; . . . . . . 17
REYNOLDS ........ 55
GAINSBOROUGH C^**\ . . . . .90
ROMNEY 128
GEORGE MORLAND . . . . . . 171
LAWRENCE . . . ... . . . 202
TURNER . . . . . . . . 226
CONSTABLE ....... 257
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MRS. SlDDONS AS THE TRAGIC MuSE. By SlR JoSHUA
REYNOLDS . . . Frontispiece
From the Painting in the DulivicA Gallery
FACING PAGE
THE SHRIMP-GIRL. By WILLIAM HOGARTH . . 24
From the Painting in the National Gallery
MARRIAGE A LA MODE : SCENE II. By WILLIAM
HOGARTH . . . 32
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE MARCH TO FINCHLEY. By WILLIAM HOGARTH . 40
After the Painting at the Foundling Hospital
SIGISMUNDA. By WILLIAM HOGARTH . 46
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE THREE GRACES DECORATING A TERM OF HYMEN.
By SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS . 72
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE STRAWBERRY GIRL. By SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS . 80
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE AND HER DAUGHTER.
By SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS . 84
From the Painting at Chatsiuorth
MRS. SIDDONS. By THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH . . 96
From the Painting in the National Gallery
8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
THE MARKET-CART. By THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH . 104
From the Painting in the National Gallery
MRS. ROBINSON (" PERDITA "). By THOMAS GAINS-
BOROUGH . . . ..112
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
THE MORNING WALK (SQUIRE HALLETT AND HIS
WIFE). By THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH . . 118
From the original Sketch
MRS. ROBINSON ("PERDITA"). BY GEORGE ROMNEY 136
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
LADY HAMILTON. BY GEORGE ROMNEY . .148
From the Painting in the National Gallery
LADY HAMILTON SPINNING. By GEORGE ROMNEY . 152
After the Painting in the possession of the Rt. Hon. discount Iveagh, K.P.
LADY HAMILTON AS A BACCHANTE. By GEORGE
ROMNEY . . . 158
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE VISIT TO THE BOARDING-SCHOOL. By GEORGE
MORLAND . . . 184
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
THE INSIDE OF A STABLE. By GEORGE MORLAND . 186
From the Painting in the National Gallery
RUBBING DOWN THE POST-HORSE. By GEORGE MOR-
LAND . . . .188
After the Painting
FISHERMEN HAULING IN A BOAT. By GEORGE MOR-
LAND . . . 192
From the Painting in the Victoria and Albert Museum
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 9
FACING PAGE
LADY BLESSU^TON. By SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE . 208
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
MRS. SIDDONS. By SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE . .212
From the Painting in the National Gallery
A CHILD WITH A KID. BY SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE 220
From the Painting in the National Gallery
PORTRAIT OF A LADY. By SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE . 224
From the Painting
CALAIS PIER. By J. M. W. TURNER . . 240
From the Painting in the National Gallery
ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS. By J. M. W.
TURNER . . ... 246
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE FIGHTING TE'MERAIRE TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH.
BY J. M. W. TURNER . . . 248
From the Painting in the National Gallery
RAIN, STEAM, AND SPEED : GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY.
By J. M. W. TURNER . . . 250
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE HAY-WAIN. By JOHN CONSTABLE . . . 272
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE CORNFIELD. By JOHN CONSTABLE . . . 282
From the Painting in the National Gallery
THE VALLEY FARM. By JOHN CONSTABLE . . 286
From the Oil-Sketch in the possession of Hugh Lane t Esq.
THE VALLEY FARM. By JOHN CONSTABLE . . 288
From the Painting in the National Gallery
PREFACE
book is not mainly concerned with great
English fainting, but with some great Eng-
lish painters. It is a book of lives, not a book of
critical studies. During the ten years last past,
every one of the masters who figure in the following
pages has had a monograph or two consecrated to
his art ; and the students who desire to know all
about a particular master's glazing and scumbling,
or his pigments and his vehicles, have already been
well provided for. This more modest volume,
however, offers little technical information. It at-
tempts to state not how the English masterpieces
were painted but what manner of men they were
who painted them.
The Author does not believe that the eight
painters he has discussed are the eight greatest
that England has produced. For himself, he finds
Lawrence, for example, far less valuable and
interesting than Girtin and Cozens and Bonington,
than " Old Crome " and Cotman, than Richard
ii
12 PREFACE
Wilson, and even James Ward. But there are
good reasons for including Lawrence in this volume.
Like Hogarth's, Reynolds', Gainsborough's, and
Romney's, his fortunes were bound up with Carriers;
and as the last of the notable line of artists who
painted Mrs. Siddons, he rounds off an epoch. Again,
Lawrence demands notice, if only on account of those
French critics who so absurdly place him in the
brightest constellation of English artists, with only
Constable and Gainsborough as his superiors. As
for Turner, surely one cannot be expected to take
quite seriously the small reaction against him which
followed the death of Ruskin.
In fixing upon Hogarth as the starting-point
for what follows, it is not suggested that no respect-
able native painting was being practised in England
before Hogarth reached his prime. Practically all
the pre-Hogarthian artists criticised by Horace
Walpole were aliens, it is true. But one might
fairly say, " There are more things in English
painting, Horatio, than e^er were dreamt of in your
Anecdotes" Side by side with Kneller and Lely
and even with Van Dyck, Englishmen were work-
ing to repair the disasters of the Commonwealth's
PREFACE 13
rule. Probably there was never a phase of English
painting worthy to be compared with that magnifi-
cent phase of English music in which the poly-
phonists Bird and Tallis proved themselves almost
the equals of Orlandus Lassus and Palestrina ;
but time will show that Hogarth's English pre-
decessors were not all journeymen hacks. Some of
them travelled so far as to be interested in brush-
work for its own sake, and they theorised earnestly
about their calling. But while these honourable
pioneers demand grateful mention in a Preface, it
is certain that the little we know of their lives and
works would hardly interest the general reader.
Again, the fact that the latest artists noticed in
these pages are Turner and Constable does not
necessarily imply that the succession of great
English painters has been broken. Watts is too
recently dead for proper treatment in a mainly
biographical volume. Certain other lately lauded
artists, whom it would be unbecoming to name,
are dead in more senses than one. As for the
pre-Raphaelites, for the present enough has been
published in their honour.
Eight painters are not many ; but when other-
14 PREFACE
wise well-informed men and women still go up and
down the highways and byways of Europe declaring
that, although we have had one or two painters of
genius, there is no such thing as English painting
in a broad sense, the bringing together of even eight
of our masters in one small book may be useful. \A
rapid survey of the five generations from Hogarth
to Turner shows that Englishmen can hold up their
heads. With our love of wood and field and river,
we have led the way in landscape-painting. Wher-
ever Frenchmen have equalled us in this matter, they
have done so as disciples of our Constable .{ for the
prodigiously clever legerdemain of contemporary
French impressionists is not landscape-painting
so much as chromatic variations on a landscape-
theme, in which one is challenged to marvel at an
artist or his art instead of some mood of Nature.
As painters of animals we have beaten the Dutch :
for the Dutch have represented animals either as
property or as victuals, as live-stock or dead pro-
vender, while we have shown birds and beasts
living their own lives or blithely sharing ours.
As religious painters we have done little, and
generally we have done it badly. But the reasons
PREFACE 15
for this are historical, not testhetical ; we have
lacked opportunities rather than gifts. If we have
failed in the grand style of historical painting, for
which Reynolds and Romney and Lawrence and
even Hogarth sighed, part of the explanation is that
our national temperament is hardly rhetorical
enough for the task. Historical painting is more
at home in countries where the citizens don decorated
evening clothes after breakfast, and indulge them-
selves in processions and speech-makings on the
smallest provocation.
But perhaps the most brilliant achievement of
English painting is in the region which, if popular
misconceptions of our racial character were truths,
would be for ever barred to us. Our English por-
trait-painters' women are fit to hang in the same
gallery with our English Shakespeare's heroines^
No guitar- strumming Latin with his desperate
vows, no gallant Gaul with his sparkling flatteries,
no sentimental Teuton with his immense infatua-
tion not one of these has portrayed women with
the robust yet tender chivalry, the keen yet rever-
ent insight, of the nation which allows itself to be
represented as a beefy John Bull with a brutal dog
16 PREFACE
at his huge feet. \*Ihe truth is that we are a nation
in love, either with real or with ideal women, and
that our painters are always revealing a fact which
we uncouthly try to dissemble. ~ Yet our lest 'painters
have maintained herein a good deal of English
reserve, and it is the weakness of Lawrence that he
abandoned this reserve for mawkish exaggeration.
These lines are penned in tbe city of Rib era's
" Immaculata" at a sufficient distance from the
great English collections to make an impartial
retrospect possible. Recalling the classics of our
painting in such circumstances, one is sensible of
its faults. One feels in it that insular touch which
has been the making of so much of our culture and
the marring of so much more. One feels, too, the
lack of daring, or rather, the love of solidity which
caused our cathedral builders to stop at seventy
feet where a Frenchman or a Spaniard would have
soared to a hundred and fifty. But, above all, one
feels that in the land where we have had great
building, very great poetry, and very great music,
we have indeed had great painting too.
Salamanca,
Sept. 29, 1908.
HOGARTH
(1697-1764)
and damsons ! Nuts and damsons !
Sir, have you seen the Tiger ? This
way for Jephthalis Rash Vow. Pray, Sir, have
you seen 'The Horse and No Horse/ whose
tail stands where his head should do ? Nuts
and damsons ! Nuts and damsons ! "
These and a hundred other cries and coaxings
beat upon the ears of Monsieur Sorbiere, an
adventurous Frenchman who had found his way
to Smithfield one September evening in the year
1698. Nor were there surprises for his ears
alone. His nostrils received the savours of
be-spiced sausages and of be-sauced piglets,
roasted whole on spits before glowing logs.
His eyes opened wide at such sights as two-
headed calves, men eating fire and swallowing
swords, and charming ladies weighing thirty
stone apiece. A sign over a booth announced
B 17
i8 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
that, by parting from an English coin, he could
witness The Creation of the World^ with Noah
and his beasts leaving the ark, Dives rising
up in Hell, and Lazarus lying snugly in
Abraham's bosom. Meanwhile horns, trumpets,
drums, bells, and rattles made so enormous a
din that the gamesters and the practitioners of
worse vices could find peace and quietness only
in the cloisters of the Norman church hard by.
The church was St. Bartholomew's ; and the
annual pandemonium which outraged its sanctity
was 'Bartholomew Fair.
At the time of Monsieur Sorbiere's visit, a
ten-months-old baby boy was lying within ear-
shot of the uproar in Bartholomew Close. He
was not of Cockney stock. Good yeoman blood
ran in his little veins ; and, years before, his
father had taught a village school among the
lakes and fells of Westmorland. The child's
name was William Hogarth ; and he was des-
tined to become the most popular, though not
the greatest, of English painters.
It is strange that so many writers who have
busied their pens with Hogarth's life and works
have failed to recognise Bartholomew Fair as
HOGARTH 19
one of the strongest influences upon the young
artist's mind. Foremost among the open-air
entertainments which visitors to the Fair could
see for nothing were the stages on which one
Merry Andrew after another would satirise the
society and politics of the hour. Sometimes
their lashes stung the Government into active
resentment, as when a pig was publicly roasted
over a fire which the Merry Andrew professed
to feed with depreciated paper money. But, as
a rule, the satire was of the well-worn, obvious
order which reappears in Hogarth's prints and
paintings.
Bartholomew Fair, however, did not merely
incline young Hogarth's mind in a satirical
direction. It seems to have supplied a great
deal of the letter as well as nearly all. the spirit
of his art. The picturesque crowding of oddly
mingled and restless figures, which is so distinc-
tive of Hogarth, is easy to account for when we
think of the kaleidoscopic Fair's swaying masses
of people, with here and there, in sharp contrast,
a stage full of mimic kings and queens and
heroes, over-dressed and over-posed. Little
would be left in Hogarth's gallery if one were
20 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
to banish his one-legged sailors, and pick-
pockets, and dwarfs, and young bloods making
ducks and drakes of their money, and strolling
players, and 'prentices, and gamblers, and
courtesans, and pimps and bawds, and bullies,
all greedy for ill-gotten money or hectic plea-
sure. And these were the very types thronging
Bartholomew Fair. Hogarth's childhood syn-
chronised with the Fair's best (or worst) days.
By the time he was a boy of twelve, things had
reached such a pitch that the Fair's annual
black-list of killings and woundings and rob-
bings would have appalled a Restoration rake.
Accordingly, in 1708, its duration was abridged
from fourteen days to three. But, for better or
worse, it had served Hogarth's turn. His most
impressionable years had been spent at a stone's-
throw from this microcosm of the town's vice
and folly, and its memories abode sharp and
bright in his tenacious mind.
The magnificent Horace Walpole, whose
father had not disdained to eat crackling pork
and apple sauce in the cook-booths of the Fair,
haughtily tells us that " William Hogarth was
the son of a low tradesman who bound him to
HOGARTH 21
a mean engraver." The " mean engraver " in
question was Mr. Ellis Gamble, who carried on
his contemptible business with disgusting con-
scientiousness in Cranbourne Street, Leicester
Fields. William's father was impressed by his
boy's graphic gift. He was astonishingly skilful
in seizing and recording facial expression, and
he covered himself with glory during his
apprenticeship by a sketch of a quarrelsome
tippler in the act of having his head broken
by another quarrelsome tippler's pewter pot.
Unfortunately, Mr. Ellis Gamble was not, like
Basire to whom Blake was bound apprentice, an
engraver of pictures. He was a modest engraver
of heraldic emblems upon silver plate. But one
can learn a good deal from copying lions and
unicorns a thumb-nail high.
William Hogarth was born on November
loth, 1697 ; and we know that by April 23rd,
1720, his apprenticeship was ended and he was
in business on his own account. The date on
his first trade-card was a good omen ; for April
23rd is not only the feast of Saint George,
patron of England, but also the anniversary of
Shakespeare's birth and death. The young
22 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
business man, however, began operations
modestly. Bill-heads and cards for " low trades-
men " were his staple product ; and it was only
by slow degrees that he advanced to the dignity
of a book-illustrator and occasional cartoonist.
Masquerades and Operas and a dozen illustrations
from " Hudibras " are the principal but almost
negligible survivors of his early efforts ; and, by
the time he was thirty Hogarth had accom-
plished little more than nothing. But his
chance came and he took it.
An art school was opened near Covent
Garden, with Sir James Thornhill as director ;
and one of the first students to present him-
self was William Hogarth. For two years the
tradesman's engraver worked hard at the painter's
art ; and perhaps he would have worked still
harder and far longer if he had not fallen in
love. Awkwardly enough, the lady chosen for
him by fate was none other than Sir James's
only daughter. Both Hogarth and Miss
Thornhill believed that it would be much worse
than useless to seek the paternal permission, and
so they ran away. It was for the best. Hogarth
seems to have assimilated all that the art school
HOGARTH 23
could teach him, and his further education in
painting and engraving came by way of the in-
dustrious practice of his art for daily bread.
The runaways chose their cottage on the Surrey
side ; and, with the shining and almost bridgeless
Thames for a broad moat between the bride and
her angry father, they settled down to work. The
neighbouring Vauxhall Gardens were rising into
their full fame, and Jonathan Tyers, the owner,
good-naturedly found a few little jobs of engraving
and decorative painting for Hogarth to do. So
pleasant became their relations that the old man
gave the young one a " pass," engraved on gold,
which would admit Hogarth and his friends
" a coachful " to the Gardens in perpetuity.
And Vauxhall Gardens completed what Bartho-
lomew Fair had begun. Although, to a certain
extent, the inquisitive or more vicious rich had
visited the Fair, it had been pre-eminently a
festival of the people : but, at Vauxhall, Hogarth
was able to observe at close quarters a more
fashionable society. It is true that Tyers'
patrons included too many of the precious
men and women affected by Goldsmith's in-
comparable Mr. Tibbs. But to Hogarth, who
24 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
did not at any time in his career have the run
of the stately homes of England, Vauxhall was
better than nothing. As the interesting husband
of Sir James Thornhill's handsome daughter,
and as the protege of Jonathan Tyers, he was
able to rub shoulders with celebrities, thus acquir-
ing a self-confidence which expressed itself in The
Man of Taste, a composition in which Pope and
the architect Kent are irreverently treated.
After his elopement, Hogarth's personal
history was almost bare of excitement and
adventure. The British Museum treasures a
manuscript, with Hogarth's own illustrations,
chronicling an unimportant jaunt to the Isle of
Sheppey, and he also nade a journey to Calais
which yielded him the supreme thrill of his
career. For the rest, we must fall back upon the
just remark of one of his early biographers : "His
Life is in his Pictures." While he was at work,
his multitudinous creations were so real to him
that their hates and loves and splendours and
miseries were his own. They were his cup-
bearers ; and he drank through them so deeply of
human life that he was content to be humdrum
in his own daily intercourse with the outer world.
THE SHRIMP-GIRL
By
WILLIAM HOGARTH
From the Painting in the National Gallery
HOGARTH 25
It was with the six pictures called A Harlot's
Progress that Hogarth laid hold upon fame. Of
the original paintings only one has survived,
the others having perished in one of those Job-
like catastrophes which fell upon the parvenu
Beckford's palace at Fonthill. But although five
of the canvases are no more, all the world knows
the grievous history of poor Moll Hackabout
from the thousands of good, bad, and indifferent
impressions which Hogarth, and his foes the
pirates, printed from their copper-plates. To say
that A Harlot's Progress is famous by reason of
its artistic qualities would be absurd. Its im-
measurable popularity is mainly due to the
fact that the six pictures re-tell clearly and boldly
a story of evergreen interest, and that, by
rubbing in a stern moral, they win over those
who would otherwise find them objectionable.
In only one of the half-dozen canvases (No. II,
the sole survivor, which is in the possession of
the Earl of Wemyss) are there any signs of
the poor fille de joie having enjoyed herself;
and, even in this scene, she is kicking over
the tea-table. In the third scene she has sunk
into squalor and crime ; in the fourth she
26 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
suffers indignities in prison ; in the fifth she
dies ; and in the sixth her own child sits con-
tentedly winding a top beside her coffin.
Morbidly greedy of sordid horrors, Hogarth's
contemporaries pounced upon the poor corpse
of Moll Hackabout like vultures. Her Progress
from happy innocence to shame and death was
versified for broad - sheets, bawled by ballad-
mongers, and even dramatised for the stage.
Hogarth made nearly ^1300 by the venture;
but other people probably made more.
The Rakes Progress was much better than the
Harlot's. It has been suggested that its artistic
superiority explains its having been less popular.
But the general public does not resent good
painting, so long as it is not baulked of the
anecdotes and novelettes which it requires
painters to narrate in their works. The reason
for the Rake's slightly cooler reception lies in the
fact that a fair and frail woman is more generally
interesting than a spendthrift young man. One
must also take account of that curious human
tendency which is best illustrated by the re-
viewers who habitually " crab " the second book
of any author who has scored a success with his
HOGARTH 27
first. Further, before launching the eight
engravings of The Rake's Progress, Hogarth had
secured an exclusive right in his own designs
by means of the Copyright Act of 1735, which
partially disabled the pirates and thereby re-
stricted the circulation of the new work.
In studying this second Progress we are at
an advantage. All the originals exist. Hogarth
sold them for twenty-two guineas each, and they
are now in the bizarre little Soane Museum in
Lincoln's Inn Fields. Through some perversity
they are so hung that Nos. V-VIII are in the
places which should be occupied by Nos. I-IV ;
but they can be well seen, in spite of the glass
which protects the pigments from the gnawing
London atmosphere. For the sake of pilgrims
who have only known the Rake in engravings,
it may be well to explain that the figures in the
paintings are " the other way round." l Non-
artistic visitors, for whom the play's the thing
and the play alone, generally show disappoint-
1 This remark does not apply to all copper-plates after Hogarth. The
engravings made direct from the pictures were "in reverse"; but some
later wielders of the burin, who worked from the first engravings instead of
from the paintings, " reversed " back again to the original orientation of the
figures.
28 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
ment before the Soane's treasure. They have
come expecting strong outline and brilliant
varied colour, but they find themselves face to
face with eight low-hued, old-masterly canvases
in which the preacher cannot shout down the
painter.
What may be called the libretto of The Rakes
Progress has more unity than the Harlot's. Tom
Rakewell's humbly born sweetheart, whom he
casts off at the moment of inheriting a fortune,
reappears with her little savings just as the
officers of the law are about to arrest him for
debt, and, faithful unto death, she is also an actor
in the last scene of all when he dies in Bedlam.
It is customary either to pass censure upon
Hogarth for this supposed lapse into melodrama
or to blame it upon friends who overrode his
better judgment. But Hogarth knew what he
was about. Speaking of the Progresses thirty
years later he said : " I wished to compose
pictures on canvas similar to representations on
the stage ... I have endeavoured to treat my
subject as a dramatic writer : my picture is my
stage and men and women my players/' Further,
there is significance in the fact that Hogarth
HOGARTH 29
loved to describe himself as the " Author "
rather than the Painter of the Progresses and
of Marriage a la Mode. On this account he is
sniffed at by those moderns whose talk is all of
paint, paint, nothing but paint, and whose wish
seems to be that a picture should have hardly any
subject at all. The truth is that even a painter
must have something to say, and provided he
say it well, his painting is none the worse
because his picture persuades somebody to
behave better. Giotto, Fra Angelico, the Bellinis,
Raphael, and the other great Catholic masters
painted pieces which did the work of the old
miracle and mystery plays of the mediaeval
theatre, and they did not become one whit
smaller by so doing. Nor is Hogarth the
smaller for his morality plays on canvas and
copper. The essential point is that he painted
well. As for his composition, only painters who
have tried to do likewise can fully value the
power and skill with which he arranges the heads
and heels of his crowds.
Before the Rake made his bow to the Town,
the Author's circumstances had changed. A
reconciliation with Sir James Thornhill had been
30 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
brought to pass by Mrs. Hogarth and her
mother. Lady Thornhill having contrived to
leave a set of the Harlot's Progress in her
husband's room, the great man condescended to
praise it with the prudent remark that a painter
capable of producing such representations would
be able to support a wife without a dowry.
Shortly afterwards the young couple appear to
have made a stay under the Thornhill roof:
and when Sir James died, in 1734, Hogarth
succeeded to the art school. He reorganised it
upon the democratic principle of equal expense-
sharing and equal voting-power for all the
members, and introduced the living model. For
thirty years Hogarth directed this life-school in
so enlightened a manner that, even if every one
of his own works had perished, he would still
hold a proud place in English art history. In
this connection, he has always had less than his
due and is still misrepresented. Burlington
House, the seat of the Academy for which
Thornhill and his son-in-law smoothed the way,
very properly, has Hogarth's fine picture repre-
senting the life-class in session.
With his earnings from the first Progress the
HOGARTH 31
painter was able to house himself becomingly
"At the Sign of the Golden Head" in Leicester
Fields. Unhappily he fondled the belief that
he could do too many different things, in-
cluding grand historical painting. The remarks
of Reynolds on this misfortune are worth
repeating. After praising Gainsborough for
leaving historical painting alone, Reynolds
says :
And here it naturally occurs to oppose the sensible
conduct of Gainsborough in this respect to that of
our late excellent Hogarth, who, with all his extra-
ordinary talents, was not blessed with this knowledge
of his own deficiency, or of the bounds which were
set to the extent of his own powers. After this
admirable artist had spent the greatest part of his life
in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful atten-
tion to the ridicule of life, after he had invented a
new species of dramatic painting, in which probably
he will never be equalled, and had stored his mind
with infinite materials to explain and illustrate the
domestic and familiar scenes of common life, which
were generally and ought to have been always the
subject of his pencil ; he very imprudently, or rather
presumptuously, attempted the great historical style,
for which his previous habits had by no means pre-
pared him : he was indeed so entirely unacquainted
with the principles of this style that he was not even
32 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
aware that any artificial preparation was at all neces-
sary. It is to be regretted that any part of the life
of such a genius should be fruitlessly employed. Let
his failure teach us not to indulge ourselves in the vain
imagination that by a momentary resolution we can
give either dexterity to the hand or a new habit to
the mind. 1
The walls of the staircase at St. Bartholo-
mew's Hospital received Hogarth's efforts in
the grand style. The best that can be said
for them is that the subjects The Good Samari-
tan and The Pool of Eethesda were intelligently
chosen. Yet Hogarth's powers, in his proper
field, were almost at their height about this time.
For proof one has only to look at Southwark
Fair, with its handsome girl beating a drum,
the Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, the
Distressed Poet, which rivals Southwark Fair as
regards the good looks of its leading lady, and
The Four Times of Day. Before 1 740, Hogarth
had also painted Captain Coram, the best of
all his single portraits and his own prime
1 Reynolds' Fourteenth Discourse. The discourser's mind seems to
have been working mainly upon Hogarth's Sigismunda, painted when the
artist was sixty years old ; but Reynolds' remarks apply with greater force
to Hogarth's frescoes and biblical paintings.
a "
W (^
i!
l-Vi
1-1 -S
HOGARTH 33
favourite. The Captain Coram may still be seen
at the Foundling Hospital along with Hogarth's
magnificent March to Finchky (1750) and his
miserable Moses brought before Pharaoh's Daughter
(1752), of which Horace Walpole justly said,
that if the painter meant it to be taken
seriously, he ought to have been confined in a
strait-jacket.
It was in 1745, when he was in his forty-
eighth year, that Hogarth's masterpiece was
completed. This was the Marriage a la Mode,
a Progress in six tableaux. The original paint-
ings hang in the National Gallery, facing such
notable works from the same brush as the
amazingly fine portrait of Hogarth's sister, the
six heads of his servants, Calais Gate, the un-
lucky Sigismunda, The Shrimp-Girl, the Portrait
of Miss Lavinia Fenton as Polly Peachum in " The
Beggars' Opera" and Hogarth's portrait of him-
self with his Dog Trump. The plot of
Marriage a la Mode is sordid. Viscount Squan-
derfield marries " beneath him " for money.
Boredom on both sides leads to dishonour and
early death. The third scene is unclear ; indeed,
all one can be sure of is that Mr. Austin
c
34 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Dobson is wrong in supposing that Viscount
Squanderfield is threatening the quack's wife with
his cane, and that her curious clasp-knife is being
drawn in defence. The shame and horror of
the last two scenes are so great that one cannot
wonder at Hogarth's resolving to take their
bitter taste out of people's mouths by painting
a companion series to be called The Happy
Marriage. True, The Happy Marriage idea was
never realised ; but it is worth noting that
Hogarth, who was not a satirist of the sour-
hearted order, at least proposed it.
As painting, Marriage a la Mode stands high.
The second scene, here reproduced, is quite
original in composition, and the drawing of the
husband is a marvel of observation and expression.
The clock shows that it is twenty minutes past
noon, yet the candles are still burning and the
disorder of an all-night entertainment has not
been removed. Viscount Squanderfield has just
returned from his independent pleasures, and he
sprawls, with broken sword and untied hair, not
even doffing his hat, before his burgess bride.
The strait-laced steward, with one paid bill
and a dozen unpaid in his hand, departs in self-
HOGARTH 35
righteous horror from a master who will give his
affairs no attention. Beyond the blue marble
columns, a footman yawns as openly as his
mistress.
While the Marriage series was being engraved,
Hogarth decided to get the original paintings of
the earlier Progresses off his hands. Accordingly
he announced a sale by auction on unfamiliar
lines. A special clock was prepared so as to
strike at intervals of five minutes. The auction
was to begin punctually at the hour appointed ;
and, at the end of the first five minutes, picture
Number One in the catalogue was to be knocked
down. At ten minutes past the hour the clock
was similarly to cut short the bidding for Number
Two, and so on, till all the lots were disposed
of. No bidder was to advance less than gold.
These extraordinary arrangements repelled the
majority of picture-buyers, with the result that
the six pictures of the almost world-famous
Harlot's Progress went for fourteen guineas apiece,
the whole sale producing much less than 500.
But the sale had its humours. One old beau on
crutches, who wished to be taken for a sad dog
and a deuce of a fellow, made a bid for the
36 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Rake, exclaiming, " 1 will bid for my own
Progress ! "
Learning the wrong lesson from this disaster,
Hogarth advertised Marriage a la Mode for sale, in
1750, on equally unpractical lines. No dealers
were to be admitted to the room, and bidding
was to be by written notes only. The highest
bidder by noon on June 6th was to secure the
paintings. When the day came the dealers
were not the only people to stay away. Indeed,
as Mr. John Lane, of Hillingdon, entered the
room he saw that he and Hogarth and Hogarth's
friend had the whole place to themselves. At
noon Mr. Lane's bid of twenty pounds for each
of the six pictures was both the highest and the
lowest. The one and only bidder behaved hand-
somely. Not only did he " make it guineas,"
but he gave Hogarth a few hours to find a better
bid. The better bid was not forthcoming, and
Mr. Lane became the owner of Marriage a la
Mode for 126. In 1797 the set was sold for
a thousand guineas.
The next Progress, Industry and Idleness (1747),
is most precious to artists on the strength of
the preliminary drawings preserved in the Print
HOGARTH 37
Room of the British Museum. The Print Room
officials will show them to any serious student
who will take the trouble to ask for a sight of
them ; and, until he has seen them, no admirer
of Hogarth knows how great a master this artist
was. The sixth scene, with an advancing line
of drummers, is beyond praise. 1 But, to most
people, Industry and Idleness will continue to be
known in the engraved copies. The twelve
compositions set forth the life histories of two
apprentices, the Idler being finally swung off at
Tyburn while the other marries his master's
daughter and becomes Lord Mayor of London.
This longest of Hogarth's moralities smacks too
much of the late Mr. Samuel Smiles for some
tastes : but it contains some of the most striking of
the many fine passages which abound in Hogarth's
works. And it is just possible that, here and
there, shrewd satire lurks under the con-
ventional morality. The smug Industrious
Apprentice "fulfilling his Christian duty" in
church in company with an engaging young
1 A coloured reproduction of this drawing will be found in the 1902
edition of William Hogarth, by Austin Dobson. This, by far the best work
on the subject, contains a too short but valuable note on Hogarth as a
painter by Sir Walter Armstrong.
38 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
woman certainly seems to be making the best
of both worlds.
The following year Hogarth executed his
Paul before Felix; also a burlesque print with
the same title said to be aimed at the school of
Rembrandt. If the subject were not a sacred
one, Hogarth's serious effort would be the more
laughable of the two. After completing it he
set out for France. Pooh-poohing everything
French, he allowed his insular prejudices to
deprive him of nearly all the pleasure and profit
he ought to have won from his voyage. An
indiscreet attempt to sketch one of the gates of
the town caused him to be first locked up as a
spy and then deported to England. That ill-
tempered and unpleasing caricature, in elaborate
paint, known as Calais Gate ; or the Roast Beef
of Old England was his revenge for this indig-
nity. The huge sirloin figured in the picture
is supposed to be on its way to the " Lion
d'Argent," for the dinner of some English travel-
lers, and the thin French soldiers who gaze at it
so hungrily and enviously are supposed to be
"frog-eaters." The lines under his print, The
Invasion, further reveal Hogarth's degree of
HOGARTH 39
enlightenment in regard to his neighbours across
the Channel. They run :
. . . But soon we'll teach these bragging foes
That beef and beer give heavier blows
Than soup and roasted frogs.
In 1751, when a Bill to restrict the sale of
ardent spirits was before the country, Hogarth
came forward with Beer Street and Gin Lane. In
the first print a burly and happy populace may
be seen putting down pots of honest ale.
Everybody has work and wages save the poor
pawnbroker, who is taking in his own modest
supply of liquid through a hole in the door
for fear of the bailiffs. Underneath this idyllic
scene run the doggerel verses :
Beer, happy produce of our isle,
Can sinewy strength impart ;
And, wearied with fatigue and toil,
Can cheer each manly heart.
Labour and Art, upheld by thee,
Successfully advance ;
We quaff the balmy juice with glee,
And water leave to France.
Genius of health ! thy grateful taste
Rivals the cup of Jove ;
And warms each generous English heart
With liberty and love.
40 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
In Gin Lane horrors unmentionable are piled
on horrors unthinkable. The buildings of the
Lane are toppling ruins, and only the undertaker
and the pawnbroker are flourishing all through
Gin, " the cursed fiend, the deadly draught, the
damned cup." On first thoughts one is tempted
to complain that Hogarth has shouted out his
message too loudly. But he knew that there
were dull ears and slow wits among his contem-
poraries. 1 Reproached on one occasion with the
roughness of his methods as an engraver, he
defended his bold strong strokes by saying that
" as they were addressed to hard hearts he left
them hard." And how hard human hearts
could be he showed in The Four Stages of
Cruelty, the Progress which followed Gin Lane.
In the First Stage such fiendish cruelty is being
practised on poor birds and beasts that a boy
springs forward offering a tart as their ransom.
Part of the under-running legend is :
Behold a youth of gentle heart,
To spare the creature's pain,
" Oh, take," he cries, " take all my tart."
But tears and tart are vain.
1 As there are among ours. In William Hogarth, by G. Elliot
Anstruther, London, 1902, Qin Lane and ^Beer Street are twice referred
to as "two pictures illustrative of the drink-evil, far overdone in their
horrible directness."
al
H ^
w
HOGARTH 41
One condones the verses for the sake of the
human kindness. Tolerable poetry was plentiful
in Hogarth's century ; but mercy to dumb beasts
did not superabound.
Soon after finishing the Four Stages the
" Author " came forward as an author in the
commoner sense of the word. In 1753 he pub-
lished his "Analysis of Beauty." To understand
this work one must go back eight years to the
Portrait of Hogarth with his Dog Trump, which
is now in the National Gallery. Across the
lower left-hand corner of the portrait is traced
a curving line inscribed "The line of Beauty
and Grace." According to the painter, who was
not without vanity, no Egyptian hieroglyphic ever
provoked greater curiosity, and "The Analysis
of Beauty " was written to expound the mystery.
The book was professedly based on the text
(attributed to Michelangelo) that a figure should
always be " Pyramidal, Serpentlike, and multi-
plied by one, two, three." The " Analysis " is
not a good book, but it has some good things. It
contains a very long preface, a long introduc-
tion, and two excessively crowded and inade-
quate plates. Hogarth begins by complaining
42 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
that critics have called Grace the je ne sais pas
in painting. He stands up boldly with zje sais.
Artists, he says, should "consider objects merely
as shells composed of lines." In capital letters he
declares that Beauty consists of Fitness, Variety,
Uniformity, Simplicity, Intricacy, and Quantity.
Dealing with Intricacy he says happily :
The active mind is ever bent to be employed. . . .
The love of pursuit is implanted in our natures. . . .
Even cats will risk the losing of their prey to chase
it over again. . . .
The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding
walks and serpentine rivers. . . .
Intricacy of form, therefore, I shall define to be
that peculiarity in the lines which compose it that
leads the eye a wanton kind of chase.
Of Quantity he says that
Windsor Castle is a noble instance. It is quantity
with simplicity, which makes it one of the finest
objects in the kingdom, though void of any regular
order of architecture.
Still more remarkable is this acute question :
Have not many Gothic buildings a great deal of
consistent beauty in them ? perhaps acquired by a
series of improvements made from time to time by
the natural persuasion of the eye which often very
nearly answers the end of working by principles and
sometimes begets them.
HOGARTH 43
Hogarth, indeed, got so far as to perceive
some of the worth of Westminster Abbey,
although, as a true son of the age, he preferred
St. Paul's. He admired the stone pineapples
on the facade, and declared that Wren would not
have used the globe and cross on the dome save
for religious reasons.
Certain men of letters drawing too widely
an unconscious inference from the literary man's
misconception of painting have assumed that
no painter can write. Reynolds' "Discourses"
were ascribed to Burke and Malone, and prob-
ably some day Whistler's Ten o'clock will be
credited to Mr. Charles Whibley. In the same
spirit nearly all the good things in the "Analysis
of Beauty " have been put down to Hogarth's
friends. But there is abundant evidence that
" the Author " was nimble with his pen. Take,
for example, this " No Dedication," which was
found among his papers :
THE NO DEDICATION
Not Dedicated to any Prince in Christendom for
fear it might be thought an Idle piece of arrogance.
Not Dedicated to any man of quality for fear it
might be thought too assuming.
44 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Not Dedicated to any learned body of Men, as
either of the Universities, or the Royal Society, for
fear it might be thought an uncommon piece of
Vanity.
Not Dedicated to any one particular Friend for fear
of offending another.
Therefore Dedicated to Nobody.
But if for once we may suppose Nobody to be
every body, as Every body is often said to be nobody,
then is this work Dedicated to every body
By their most humble
and devoted
W. HOGARTH.
Still better worth quoting is the following letter
which, over the pen-name " Britophil," Hogarth
addressed to the St. James's Evening Post of
June 7-9, 1737:
There is another set of gentry more noxious to the
Art than these, and those are your picture-jobbers from
abroad, who are always ready to raise a great cry in
the prints whenever they think their craft is in danger ;
and indeed it is their interest to depreciate every
English work, as hurtful to their trade of continually
importing ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families,
Madonas, and other dismal dark subjects, neither
entertaining nor ornamental ; on which they scrawl
the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and
fix on us poor Englishmen the character of universal
HOGARTH 45
dupes. If a man, naturally a judge of Painting, not
bigoted to these empirics, should cast his eye on one of
their sham virtuoso-pieces, he would be very apt to say,
" Mr. Bubbleman, that grand Venus (as you are pleased
to call it) has not beauty enough for the character of
an English cook-maid." Upon which the quack
answers with a confident air, " O Sir, I find that you
are no connoisseur that picture, I assure you, is in
Alesso Baldovinetto's second and best manner, boldly
painted and truly sublime ; the contour gracious ; the
air of the head in the most high Greek taste, and a
most divine idea it is." Then spitting on an obscure
place and rubbing it with a dirty handkerchief, takes a
skip to the other end of the room, and screams out in
raptures, " There is an amazing touch ! a man should
have this picture in his collection a twelve-month
before he can discover half its beauties." The gentle-
man (though naturally a judge of the beautiful, yet
ashamed to be out of the fashion in judging for
himself) with this cant is struck dumb, gives a vast
sum for the picture, very modestly confesses he is
indeed quite ignorant of Painting, and bestows a frame
worth fifty pounds on a frightful thing, without the
hard name on it not worth as many farthings.
In its time the " Analysis of Beauty " was taken
seriously enough to be translated into French,
Italian, and German. It promoted the bruiting
about of Hogarth's name, and in 1757 he re-
ceived a Court appointment as Sergeant Painter
46 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
to His Majesty. The sergeant paintership was
nominally worth only 10 a year, but one thing
and another brought it up to 200. Meanwhile,
Hogarth had finished the four paintings called
The Election, which hang to the right and left of
The pake's Progress on the folding walls of the
Soane Museum.
Mr. Pierpont Morgan is the lucky owner of
The Lady's Last Stake, painted by Hogarth the
year after he became Sergeant Painter. This
piece earned him immediate cash and credit, but
brought bitterness in its train. Sir Richard
Grosvenor, having seen and admired it, com-
missioned a picture for himself. The result was
Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo.
This was the work which called down the
magniloquent regrets of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
whose own Ugolino is more pretentious and quite
as bad. Horace Walpole's refined tribute to
Hogarth's performance ran :
No more like Sigismunda than I to Hercules. Not
to mention the wretched colouring, it was the
representation of a wretched strumpet just turned out
of keeping, and with eyes red with rage and usque-
baugh tearing off the ornaments her keeper had given
HOGARTH 47
her . . . her fingers blooded by her lover's heart that
lay before her, like a sheep's, for her dinner.
To the objection that poor Sigismunda's
fingers are not " blooded," Horace Walpole
made answer that the gore had been subsequently
painted out. On this and all other points touch-
ing Sigismunda the visitor to the National Gallery
can judge for himself. His conclusion will
probably be that the picture is not nearly so
good as Hogarth believed and not nearly so bad
as his enemies declared it to be.
Sir Richard Grosvenor threw Sigismunda back
on the painter's hands, and it was not sold until
many years after his death. By this time
Hogarth was turned sixty. From a pecuniary
standpoint, art was in a depressed condition.
Such money as was being spent by wealthy
patrons on their own portraits did not come
Hogarth's way, for the simple reason that
Hogarth could not or would not give his sitters
the indispensable well-bred air. Something
had to be done : so Hogarth turned from general
satire to party politics. His patron, Bute, be-
coming Prime Minister in 1762, Hogarth decided
to " do something in the ministerial interest."
48 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
His old friends of the Opposition, Wilkes of the
North Briton, and Churchill, the "Bruiser/'
warned him in vain that if he did not desist he
must not rely on auld lang syne to save him
from their wrath. Hogarth set to work on a
sequence to be called The Times, and published
the first rather ineffective plate. Wilkes was as
bad as his word. Taking a leaf out of John
Milton's pitiful retort to Salmasius, he struck at
the artist through his wife. One of the most
pathetic relics Hogarth left behind him was a
copy of the North Briton worn by the constant
pocketing and unpocketing of the days when he
carried it, with a hot and bitter heart, from
friend to friend. In English nearly as bad as his
taste, Wilkes said :
The favourite Sigismunda, the labour of so many
years, the boasted effort of his art, was not human;
and if the figure had any resemblance to anything
ever on earth, or had any pretence to meaning or
expression, it was what he had seen, or perhaps made,
in real life, his own wife in an agony of passion, but
of what passion no connoisseur could guess.
At the same time the Bruiser was excogitat-
ing his Epistle to William Hogarth, which Garrick
HOGARTH 49
vainly tried to repress in these admirable
words :
I must entreat of you, by ye Regard you profess
to me, that you don't tilt at my friend Hogarth till
you see me. ... He is a great and original Genius.
I love him as a man and reverence him as an artist. I
would not for all ye Politicks and politicians in ye
Universe that you two should have the least cause of
Ill-will to each other. I am sure you will not publish
against him if you think twice.
Churchill's second thoughts were the same as
his first. He published. But Hogarth did not
take the attack lying down. He produced
caricatures of both the North Briton and the
Bruiser, exaggerating the squint of Wilkes, and
depicting Churchill as a bear with a tankard of
ale, a collecting-box, and other significant acces-
sories. On the whole Hogarth did not admit
that he had had the worst of it. " The pleasure
and pecuniary profit which I have derived from
these two engravings," he said, "together with
occasional riding on horseback, have restored me
to as much health as can be expected at my time
of life."
But the following year he prophesied his
50 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
approaching end in the plate called Finis; or the
Bathos. Amidst a rui'ned tower, a broken
column, a cracked bell, a dry palette, and a
confusion of useless tools and weapons Time
gives up his old ghost beside his broken scythe
and shattered hour-glass. Apollo lies dead in
his chariot, the hands have dropped from the
clock, the moon is in eclipse, a ship is sinking,
and the signboard of The World's End Inn is
tumbling down. A printed play is open at the
final words "Exeunt Omnes"; and, so as to
connect the author himself with his work, an
expiring candle sets fire to a copy of his engrav-
ing, The Times. If Hogarth meant to be merely
playful in this work and playfulness had
certainly been his intention in some similar
pieces the joke was not his best: but if, as
some maintain, it was gravely done, its painful-
ness is extreme. It is too much like Gay's
cynical epitaph,
Life is a jest, and all things show it,
I thoug t so once and now I know it,
which desecrates the most honourable wall in
Westminster Abbey. In any case, one could
HOGARTH 51
wish that this had not been Hogarth's last
picture.
On October 25th, 1764, he was borne,
weak and ill, from his house at Chiswick,
which still stands, to his old home in Leicester
Fields. He arrived in good spirits : but the
same day he died. He was buried in Chiswick
churchyard. Garrick wrote this epitaph on his
tomb :
Farewell, great Painter of Mankind !
Who reached the noblest point of art,
Whose pictured Morals charm the Mind,
And through the Eye correct the Heart.
If genius fire thee, Reader, stay ;
If Nature touch thee, drop a tear ;
If neither move thee, turn away,
For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here.
Epitaphs are written to be read with charity ;
and Garrick himself would not have maintained
in cold blood that Hogarth indeed " reach'd the
noblest point of art." Nor must Mr. Austin
Dobson be taken too literally in his declara-
tion that Hogarth was " a magnificent painter,
worthy to rank in all respects with the greatest
masters of the brush." Nevertheless, we must
52 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
not relapse into the old error of those who
valued Hogarth as a moralist first and as a
painter afterwards. The recent tendency to
place him, purely as a painter, an inch or so
too high, will not excuse us in dropping him,
as our great-grandfathers did, a yard too low.
If his compositions told no story, lashed no vice,
preached up no virtue, enforced no moral in
other words, if they were simply so many
detached scenes, like Van Ostade's and Jan
Steen's and Wilkie's they would still stand as
a great achievement in paint from which every
succeeding generation has something to learn.
His Miss Arnold in the Fitzwilliam Museum at
Cambridge ; his David Garrick and bis Wife at
Windsor Castle ; his Peg Woffington^ owned by
Sir Charles Tennant, and many other portraits,
show how arrestive he can be even when he has
no tale to tell.
As a satirist Hogarth was not subtle. But
for the matter of that, neither was Juvenal.
The truth is that your super-subtle satirists
hardly make themselves heard or seen. Hogarth
is perspicuous enough for the humblest be-
holder, and this is the quality which Fielding
HOGARTH 53
had in mind when he said that the "Progresses"
were "calculated more to serve the Cause of
Virtue and for the Preservation of Mankind
than all the Folios of Morality which have ever
been written." His idiom was often coarse and
boisterous, but his undertones breathed more
of kindness than of censorious bitterness.
As documents chronicling the urban morals
and manners and trappings and backgrounds of
the eighteenth century, his paintings must always
be of the highest value, provided the historians
who consult them can do what too many of
them have failed to do in the past ; that is,
discriminate between the normal facts and the
satirical fancies. There have been many differ-
ent Englands, existing side by side, at every
moment since our history began, and happily, in
Hogarth's day, there were sounder and cleaner
Englands than his England of gaming and tip-
pling and chambering and cheating and grabbing
and wounding and killing. But he dealt faith-
fully with the England he knew. And, if one
must take leave of this moralist with a moral
reflection, let it be this : Hogarth so painted
ugliness as to move the common people towards
54 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
virtue ; and thereby he was a better citizen than
those who so paint beauty as to weaken the
unbalanced and the non-artistic in their resolves
against vice. His materials were the devil's ;
his side was the angels'.
REYNOLDS
(1723-1792)
AX/'HILE Hogarth was at work on the first
of the Progresses amidst the reek and
noise of London, a child was attempting sketches
on the backs of his school exercises beside a
pleasant water in Devon. " This is drawn by
Joshua, in school, out of pure idleness," wrote
his aggrieved father on one of the sketches ; for
how could he divine that the child's " pure idle-
ness " would do what his own industriousness
had failed to do and make the name of Reynolds
one of the boasts of England ?
To imagine Sir Joshua Reynolds as a small
boy smacks of indecorum. One has the same
feeling about his great friend, Dr. Johnson.
We are so accustomed to the grandiosity of
these two figures the one the oracle of Art, the
other the pontiff of Literature and of almost
everything else under the sun that it is hard
55
56 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
to believe there was ever a time in their lives
when they were not " Sir Joshua " and " the
Doctor." 1 But, seeing that even popes and
emperors have begun their careers by screaming
and pulling their nurses' hair, it is lawful to say
that Sir Joshua had a childhood. Indeed, his
dignity suffered impudence long before he could
speak ; for his name was taken in vain as soon
as he had it, and he was entered in the parish
register, not as Joshua but as "Joseph, son of
Samuel Reynolds, Clerk."
Samuel Reynolds, Clerk, was of course a clerk
in holy orders. As head-master of Plympton
Earl Grammar School, he enjoyed an income
which, at the present purchasing- power of
money, would be about $oo a year. But he
had married for love Theophila Potter, a maid
whose face was all her fortune ; and, as the
union was blessed with eleven or twelve chil-
dren, of whom five outlived their father, the
little Joshua was not spoiled by excessive luxury.
Happily, Plympton Earl was a place wherein
1 Reynolds himself was once irreverent enough to paint a portrait of
Johnson as he imagined Johnson to have appeared at the age of two. But
this was after Johnson's death.
REYNOLDS 57
one could make life go pleasantly on small
resources. Before its upstart neighbour, Ply-
mouth, had been so much as thought of, Plymp-
ton Earl was already an ancient town with a
famous priory, a Norman castle, a mayor and
alderman, a Member of Parliament, fairs and a
market, all complete. Now that the estuary
of the Plym has receded from its walls, Plymp-
ton's municipal glory is departed. But it keeps
the cloistered school where not only Reynolds,
but also the painters Northcote and Haydon and
Eastlake, studied and played.
Joshua made fair headway with his Latin
grammar. But his hand itched always for a
pencil. One of the first books he fell upon
as soon as he had learned to read was The
Jesuit's Perspective, and by its aid he produced
so tolerable a sketch of the school cloister that
his father exclaimed, " This is wonderful ! "
Afterwards, he devoted his spare minutes to
copying the quaint cuts in Jacob Cat's Book of
Emblems, the heads in Plutarch's Lives, and,
indeed, all the prints he could lay his hands
on. From copying, he advanced to direct
portraiture. The graphic arts are said to have
58 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
begun in the outline-drawings which half-savage
men scratched on the walls of caves ; and the
almost innumerable sequence of Joshua Reynolds'
portraits similarly began on the whitewashed
wall of a long passage in the grammar school.
At first Joshua was content to portray his
sitters with the charred end of a stick ; but, on
attaining the age of twelve, he felt the responsi-
bility of his years and rose to the dignity of
canvas and oil-paint. The canvas was cut from
an old boat sail, and the paint was borrowed
from a shipwright's shop. The sitter, who sat
to the young- painter all unconsciously for a
preliminary sketch in church, was "a jolly
moon-faced tutor and parson " ; and the extra-
ordinary work of art which was finally achieved
has survived to our own day.
Five years later the choice of a profession
for Joshua pressed to be made. With at least
seven clergymen for his sire and grandsire, his
uncles, and his maternal grandfather and great-
grandfather, there was something to be said for
putting him in the way of becoming an arch-
bishop. In the event of success, his charges
to the clergy on points of faith and morals
REYNOLDS 59
might have made as good reading as his epis-
copally oracular Discourses on Art. But Joshua
does not seem to have been offered a clerical
career. He was bidden to choose between a
painter's life and a druggist's.
To make the dilemma clear, it may be well
to explain that while the standing of an apothe-
cary was, in some respects, higher than it is
to-day, the standing of a painter was lower.
Until Sir Joshua Reynolds himself, by his social
brilliancy, raised the status of professional art in
England, native painters were of small account.
They were fairly numerous because, throughout
the century which preceded the invention of
photography, there was a large demand for
painted portraits. But the plums were nearly
all eaten by a very few fashionable artists, who,
in order to discharge their commissions, em-
ployed "drapery-men," or assistants, who painted
in elaborate coats, buttons, ruffles, and swords,
leaving the great man to limn the sitter's face
only. Clearly understanding the condition of
the fine arts in England, young Joshua informed
his father that if the choice lay between selling
drugs and becoming a " drapery-man," he
60 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
would renounce the brush and take up the pestle
and mortar. But he had read Richardson's
Treatise on the Theory of Painting, and had laid
to heart the remarkable words :
I am no prophet nor the son of a prophet ; but . . .
I will venture to pronounce (as exceedingly probable)
that if ever the ancient, great, and beautiful taste in
painting revives, it will be in England.
He appears to have been impressed also
by Richardson's qualification to the effect that
English painters would have to become more
" conscious of the dignity of their country and
their profession," and that, instead of making
way for foreigners, they would have to extend
to art " that haughty impatience of subjection
and inferiority which seems to be characteristic
of our nation." On Richardson's lines, but on
no others, Joshua willed to become a painter.
At this time a Devon man, Thomas Hudson,
Richardson's son-in-law, was established in Great
Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, as one of
the English portrait-painters most in vogue.
He consented to take Joshua into his house
as an apprentice upon receipt of a premium of
;i2o. Clubbing together their savings, and
REYNOLDS 61
making a certain draft upon the future, Mr.
Reynolds and a married daughter produced the
amount, and in October, 1740, the arrangement
took effect. For a time everybody was satisfied.
Hudson had the ^"120, together with an en-
thusiastic fellow-countryman who prepared his
canvases, put in backgrounds, and cheerfully
performed even the despised work of a " drapery-
man." As for Joshua, he was in heaven. He
saw Sir Robert Walpole sit to Hudson for his
portrait, and in an auction-room he shook hands
with Pope. As for his work, he wrote of it to
his father : " While I am doing this, I am the
happiest creature alive."
What followed is obscure. Two years after
entering Hudson's house Reynolds was per-
emptorily bidden to quit it. On account of a
downpour of rain the youth had put off over-
night the delivery of a picture. " You have not
obeyed my orders, and you shall not stay in my
house," thundered Hudson ; and there was
nothing for the apprentice but to go. Accord-
ing to Reynolds* out-and-out partisans, the
affair of the delayed picture was only a shabby
pretext, and his master's true reason for showing
62 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
him the door was jealousy of the pupil's supe-
rior gifts. But Reynolds' own father would not
put all the blame on Hudson ; and as master
and pupil soon became friends again, it is un-
likely that deep motives underlay the rupture.
Within three years Hudson was forming a habit
of asking his junior's opinion on his newly
finished works, a fact which surely puts jealousy
out of the question.
Home again at quiet Plympton, Joshua
speedily found plenty of work as a modestly
paid portrait-painter. Returning to London,
where the foremost painters accepted him as
a friend, he seemed to be fairly coming into his
own when his father fell ill. Samuel Reynolds
died on Christmas Day, 1746, and until 1749
Joshua dutifully remained at Plymouth Dock
with his sisters. In after life he was wont to
deplore these three years as wasted, but they
brought him at least two visitations of good
luck. Hudson, like Richardson, had painted in
a hard and dry manner, which it was necessary
for Reynolds to unlearn, and he was assisted to
unlearn it at Exeter, where his brother Robert
was married and settled, Exeter was the home
REYNOLDS 63
of the notable artist William Gandy, who had
said that " a picture ought to have a richness in
texture, as if the colours had been composed of
cream or cheese, and the reverse of a hard and
husky or dry manner." This dictum and the
sight of Candy's fatly painted pictures awoke in
Reynolds his dormant sense of paint. The
second stroke of luck seemed greater still.
From childhood Reynolds had been acquainted
with Lord Edgcumbe, and in 1749 he met at
the nobleman's house the young and dashing
Commodore Keppel. The Commodore was
about to sail for the Mediterranean, and he
offered to take Reynolds as far as Leghorn,
whence he could make his way cheaply to
Florence and Rome.
The sacred name of Rome rang upon the ears
of eighteenth-century artists with a resounding
grandeur of which our own young painters can
have only a faint conception. When Keppel
made his proposal Hogarth was the only truly
great painter England had produced, and
Hogarth's works always impressed Reynolds
more as slashing journalism than as immortal
classics. There were very many fine canvases
64 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
in England from the brushes of domiciled
foreigners, including Vandyck, Lely, and
Kneller, and there had also been a large im-
portation of first-rank works by far greater
masters. But these fine things were in private
hands. There was no National Gallery and, of
course, no photographs of the treasures in
foreign collections. Nowadays a London clerk
or shop-girl may see quite a hundred times more
of the world's masterpieces than Hogarth ever
saw in his life. To take an example, for a
knowledge of Michelangelo the stay-at-home
was dependent on engravings, most of which
were guilty of the muscular exaggeration which
so misled poor Blake. Only by means of some
sort of a Grand Tour was it possible to know
what painting meant : and the climax of a
Grand Tour was Rome. Reynolds' friends and
relations once more came forward with funds,
and on May 1 1 the " Centurion," with the eager
artist on board, weighed anchor for Lisbon.
The " Centurion " took a fortnight to cover the
stretch of water over which to-day's mail-boats
dash in sixty hours. But Reynolds was privi-
leged to see a city which neither frigate nor
REYNOLDS 65
liner can reach any more the Moorish and
mediaeval and Manueline city of Lisbon which
the earthquake of 1755 all but brought to ruin.
After Lisbon the " Centurion " touched at
Gibraltar, and, after Gibraltar, at Algiers. In
the island of Minorca Reynolds came to sorrow.
His horse fell with him over a precipice, and a
part of his upper lip had to be cut away. Two
months of weakness followed, but at last he
entered Rome.
Italy held him for three years. Many Eng-
lishmen ran against him in Rome, including the
needy Astley, 1 and Richard Wilson the land-
scape-painter, of whom England is insufficiently
proud. With these were mingled certain noble
patrons of the arts whose friendship afterwards
helped Reynolds on his social way in England.
But he had come to Rome to work ; and work
he did. To his deep concern, Raphael at first
disappointed him ; but he had the modesty and
sense to know that the fault was not in Raphael.
Michelangelo, however, surpassed his expecta-
1 Room must be found for one anecdote about this delightful Irishman.
During a picnic near Rome, when the fierce heat compelled everybody to
doff his coat, the back of Astley's waistcoat was found to have been
mended with canvas from one of his pictures representing a waterfall.
66 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
tions. Thus, on the Feast of the Assumption,
1750, his notebook says: "I was let into the
Capella Sistina in the morning and remained
there the whole day, a great part of which I
spent in walking up and down in it with great
self-importance. Passing through, on my return,
the rooms of Raffaelle, they appeared of an in-
ferior order." In this connection a few passages
from the Fifth Discourse, which he delivered
twenty-two years later, are worth quoting.
Raffaelle's easel-works stand in a lower degree of
estimation [than his frescoes] ; for though he con-
tinually, to the day of his death, embellished his
performances more and more with the addition of
those lower ornaments which entirely make the merit
of some painters, yet he never arrived at such per-
fection as to make him an object of imitation. He
never was able to conquer perfectly that dryness, or
even littleness of manner, which he inherited from his
master. He never acquired that nicety of taste in
colours, that breadth of light and shadow, that art
and management of uniting light to light and shadow
to shadow so as to make the object rise out of the
ground with that plenitude of effect so much admired
in the works of Correggio. When he painted in oil,
his hand seemed to be so cramped and confined that
he not only lost that facility and spirit, but I think even
that correctness of form which is so perfect and admir-
REYNOLDS 67
able in his fresco-works. ... I have no desire to
degrade Raffaelle from the high rank which he
deservedly holds : but, by comparing him with him-
self, he does not appear to me the same man in oil as
in fresco. . . .
[Michelangelo] did not possess so many excel-
lences as Raffaelle, but those which he had were the
highest kind. He considered the art as consisting of
little more than what may be attained by sculpture :
correctness of form and energy of character. We
ought not to expect more than an artist intends in his
work. He never attempted those lesser elegances and
graces in the art. Vasari says he never painted but
one picture in oil and resolved never to paint another,
saying that it was an employment only fit for women
and children. . . .
It is to Michael Angelo that we owe even the
existence of Raffaelle : it is to him Raffaelle owes the
grandeur of his style. . . . Though our judgment must
upon the whole decide in favour of Raffaelle, yet he
never takes such a firm hold and entire possession of
the mind as to make us desire nothing else and to feel
nothing wanting. The effect of the capital works of
Michael Angelo perfectly corresponds to what Bouch-
ardon said he felt from reading Homer ; his whole
frame appeared to himself to be enlarged and all nature
which surrounded him diminished to atoms.
This compound of truth and error is accounted
for by the fact that Reynolds' own talent had a
68 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Raffaelesque complexion which made him yearn
towards the huge virility of Michelangelo, just
as a dreamy blonde yearns to black hair and
flashing dark eyes. This judgment on Rem-
brandt, which he jotted down in Rome, is worth
all he has to say on the Italians :
Rembrandt's light is extremely brilliant, but it costs
too much ; the rest of the picture is sacrificed to this
one object.
"It costs too much" might have been Reynolds'
verdict on his own sojourn in Rome had he not
been single-eyed in his pursuit of art. Catching
cold on top of cold in the Vatican he became
deaf, thus adding an ear-trumpet to his cut lip.
But he did not repine.
By October, 1752, just twelve years after the
commencement of his apprenticeship to Hudson,
he was back in London, bringing with him a
pupil of his own in the person of Giuseppe
Marchi, whose portrait, by Reynolds' hand,
hangs at Burlington House in the Diploma
Gallery. A few months later he established
himself at 104 St. Martin's Lane, in the house
from which Hogarth had eloped with hand-
REYNOLDS 69
some Jane Thornhill. But he soon migrated to
5 Great Newport Street, a stone's-throw further
north, where some plaques in the saloon-bar of a
modern public-house remind the grooms from
Aldridge's of higher things. At Great Newport
Street he worked stupendously for seven years
without once taking a holiday. Fitly enough it
was by means of a portrait of his benefactor
Keppel that Reynolds became the rage. In
pursuing a French frigate too closely, Keppel
had run his own fifty-gun ship the " Maidstone "
aground, and Reynolds chose to depict him on a
French beach, with a background of wild rocks
and storm-clouds, giving the orders which saved
most of the " Maidstone's " crew. The portrait,
as reporters say, created a sensation ; and, with
Lord Edgcumbe's backing, Reynolds soon found
himself besieged by sitters. Beginning with
mere commoners and baronets and their ladies,
Reynolds rapidly advanced to the portrayal of
Ministers of State, of earls and countesses, of
dukes and duchesses (especially the Duchess of
Hamilton, the "beautiful Miss Gunning"), and,
in 1758, of the Prince of Wales. His surviving
pocket-books bear witness to his activity. Thus
70 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
in 1757 he noted 184 sitters and one dog.
Altogether, he is said to have painted three
thousand pictures in the course of his strenuous
life : but it must be added that he employed
Marchi and other drapery-men to execute the
less vital passages of his portraits. " No man,"
he pleaded in defence of this practice, " ever yet
made a fortune with his own hands." Like
Constable he had a business-like tariff of charges.
At the outset of his operations at Great Newport
Street it ran :
For a Head . . .12 guineas
For a Half-length . 24 guineas
For a Whole-length . 48 guineas
Curtains, sunset skies, and marble columns or
trees were thrown in gratis. These were the
same as Hudson's prices. But by 1759 heads
had gone up to 20 guineas ; and five years later
the counterfeit presentment of your whole body
cost you 150 guineas, payable as to one half at
the first sitting and as to the balance on delivery.
From all this it will be seen that Reynolds
was not exactly a plain liver and high thinker,
cultivating the arts on a little porridge. It must
be added, however, in his justification that he
REYNOLDS 71
never keenly relished portrait-painting, and that
he cherished worse delusions than poor Hogarth's
respecting his supposed vocation to the Grand
Style. Nor was he a miser. He formed a fine
collection of Old Masters, not as a commercial
speculation but for love of their qualities as
paintings. As soon as he could afford it, he
housed himself in some state at 47 Leicester
Square, spending ^"1500 on a gallery and on a
studio, which can still be seen. His servants
wore silver-laced liveries. Apparently by way
of advertisement, he maintained also an im-
modest chariot, painted and gilded, which is
said to have been originally a sheriff's coach.
Like Hogarth, who, on first setting up a
carriage, forgot it so completely that he left it
standing at the Mansion House door while he
walked home in the rain, Reynolds himself did
not take to this magnificent equipage : but it
often creaked under the weight of Dr. Johnson
as he was borne in it, along with Goldsmith or
some other friend, to the painter's little house
at Richmond. Reynolds' housekeeper was his
sister Frances the " dearest dear " and " Renny
dear " of Dr. Johnson.
72 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
By degrees, 47 Leicester Square became the
haunt of nearly all the talent of the time.
Perhaps his fellow-painters were less acceptable
to Reynolds than they themselves thought
proper : but, although he became the first
President of the Royal Academy, he never
favoured an academic absorption in " shop."
To use his own phrase, he went with the stream
of life. He knew and painted not only princes
and ministers and grand dames and proud
virgins and high-born children, but also actors,
poor scribblers, and even such fair and frail
celebrities as Kitty Fisher and Nelly O'Brien.
Both Kitty and Nelly he portrayed over and
over again. Indeed, it may be said that the
Kitty Fisher with a Dove and the Nelly O'Brien
at Hertford House are among the finest of his
canvases. "A painter," he said in his Seventh
Discourse, " stands in need of more knowledge
than is to be picked off his palette." This
knowledge he picked up by so assiduous an
attendance at dinners, dances, routs, clubs,
card-parties, theatrical first-nights, and social
functions of every kind that one is left wondering
how any time was found for making pictures.
1
II
{/) '
O .5
REYNOLDS 73
Yet Reynolds hardly ever scamped his work.
It must be admitted that he neglected his pupils ;
but never his own painting. Whenever he faced
a sitter and took up his brush it was with the
resolution to achieve the best picture he had
ever painted. When somebody asked him how
he had produced a certain effect in his Infant
Hercules he answered, " How can I tell ? There
are ten pictures underneath this, some better,
some worse." Having little more than the
" hard and dry " tradition behind him, he was
forced to make many experiments with pigments
and vehicles. There is a terrible story to the
effect that he even scraped his way under the
surfaces of pictures by Titian and Rembrandt to
see how those giants had worked. Unhappily
only the products of Reynolds' first and last
phases were painted on sound principles, the
works of his middle period having faded so
quickly as to justify Horace Walpole's naughty
suggestion that Reynolds' sitters, instead of pay-
ing him outright, would have done well to settle
his accounts by annuities, payable only so long
as the portraits lasted. Fortunately, however,
good engravings exist of most of Sir Joshua's
74 . GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
now lost or ruined or ghost-pale works. The
Print-Room of the British Museum can show
twelve portly albums filled with mezzotint and
other translations of the paintings, which by their
infinite variety and innumerable felicities will
astonish the amateur who has only known
Reynolds through the meagre and imperfectly
representative exhibits in public galleries.
Reynolds never married. Perhaps his daily
association with the brightest beauties of his
time made him fastidious ; or perhaps their
moods and tenses in his studio chair gave him
pause. He once told Northcote, the only one of
his pupils who did any good, that " lovers had
acknowledged to him, after seeing his portraits
of their mistresses, that the originals had appeared
even still more lovely to them than before by
their excellences being so distinctly portrayed."
But he was less successful in idealising women
on his own account. Gossips knotted his name
with poor Angelica Kauffmann's, and it has often
been asserted that he was deeply in love with
her. The evidence is insufficient. " Angel,"
in Sir Joshua's notebook, was a natural abbrevia-
tion for a busy man. That Angelica and he
REYNOLDS 75
painted one another's portraits proves nothing.
Reynolds painted his own portrait nearly a hun-
dred times, and he was once painted by Gains-
borough, between whom and himself no love
was lost. Angelica herself said that Reynolds
had made love to her : but, as she confessed that
she was " dying for Sir Joshua," she was hardly
in a state to distinguish love from gallantry. It
is true that when the lady was outrageously
cheated into a humiliating marriage Reynolds
persistently befriended her ; but did he not just
as persistently befriend Johnson and Goldsmith ?
To crown all, we have Reynolds* own admission
to Johnson that if marriage tempted him, " there
was no one he should so much fear as the little
Burney." And even the little Burney had
entered his head before she entered his heart.
We know that while the anonymity of "Evelina"
was still unbroken Reynolds sat up all night to
finish the book and that he said he would give
fifty pounds for a meeting with the author. Yet
the little Burney has put it on record that when
they came together " he did not make love."
Reynolds, however, was no crusty misogynist.
It is true that his nerves, after twenty years, re-
76 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
fused to endure any longer the constant presence
of " Renny dear," who had a maddening habit of
painting portraits for which neither nature nor
training had prepared her ; but otherwise he was
a ladies' man, with a flow of courtly compliment
which marked him as a gentleman of the old
school. For example, upon completing the
great Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (one version
of which hangs in the Dulwich Gallery), he
departed from his usual practice and signed the
picture. A mantle covers the tragedienne's knee,
and it was upon the mantle's fringe that he set
his name, saying, "I could not lose the honour
this opportunity afforded me of going down to
posterity on the hem of your garment."
Reynolds, however, had a big heart as well
as a flattering tongue. A Navy clerk, named
Mudge, the son of one of Reynolds' old friends
in Devon, had set his heart on going home for
his sixteenth birthday : but illness forbade the
long and tiresome journey. " Never mind," said
the artist, " I will send you to your father " ; and
he sent Dr. Mudge a painting of the lad peeping
from behind a curtain, as though looking on at a
family party in which he could not join.
REYNOLDS 77
John Courtenay, who was a frequent guest,
has left this account of his host's hospitality :
There was something singular in the style and
economy of Sir Joshua's table that contributed to
pleasantry and good humour ; a coarse, inelegant
plenty, without any regard to order and arrangement.
A table, prepared for seven or eight, was often com-
pelled to contain fifteen or sixteen. When this press-
ing difficulty was got over, a deficiency of knives, forks,
plates and glasses succeeded. The attendance was in
the same style ; and it was absolutely necessary to call
instantly for beer, bread, or wine, that you might be
supplied with them before the first course was over.
He was once prevailed on to furnish the table with de-
canters and glasses at dinner, to save time and prevent
the tardy manoeuvres of two or three occasional un-
disciplined domestics. As these accelerating utensils
were demolished in the course of service, Sir Joshua
could never be persuaded to replace them. But these
trifling embarrassments only served to enhance the
hilarity and singular pleasure of the entertainment.
The wine, cookery and dishes were but little attended
to ; nor was the flesh or venison ever talked of or
recommended. Amidst this convivial animated bustle
among the guests, our host sat perfectly composed ;
always attentive to what was said, never minding what
was eat or drank, but left every one at liberty to
scramble for himself. Temporal and spiritual peers,
physicians, lawyers, actors and musicians composed the
78 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
motley group, and played their parts without dissonance
or discord. At five o'clock precisely dinner was served
whether all the invited guests were arrived or not. Sir
Joshua was never so fashionably ill-bred as to wait an
hour perhaps for two or three persons of rank or title
and put the rest of the company out of humour by this
invidious distinction. His friends and intimate ac-
quaintances will ever love his memory and will regret
those social hours and the cheerfulness of that irregular,
convivial table, which no one has attempted to revive
or imitate, or indeed was qualified to supply.
Garrick was often of this goodly fellowship and
glorious company. The picture called Garrick
between Tragedy and Comedy^ in which a roguish
minx and a haughty maiden contend for the
actor's allegiance, is not only one of Reynolds'
best designs, but it is also one of his happiest
portraits. By the side of it Hogarth's Garrick
as 1(ichard III looks vulgar. Seeing that one
of his latest biographers * has argued copiously
on the thesis that Reynolds was chilly-hearted, it
is worth noting that the portrayal of his nearest
friends generally awoke the whole force of his
1 Sir Walter Armstrong, whose book is otherwise invaluable. Having
written a big book on Gainsborough before dealing with Reynolds, Sir
Walter Armstrong seems to have found a difficulty in treating Gains-
borough's great rival quite judicially.
REYNOLDS 79
genius, thus proving the liveliness of his sym-
pathy. One instance is his Admiral Keppel ; and
one still more striking is the National Gallery
portrait of Dr. Johnson, which is not simply one
of the best Reynoldses but is also one of the
best portraits in the world. A cold and hard
man could not have called from the warm heart
of Johnson the words, " If I should lose you, I
should lose almost the only man I call a friend."
These two felt one for another an affection
which admitted of almost domestic bickering.
When Reynolds twitted Johnson with his eleven
successive cups of tea, Johnson rejoined, " Sir,
I did not count your glasses of wine, why should
you number up my cups of tea ? " and when
Johnson, during his total-abstinence period,
rudely cried, " I won't argue any more with you.
Sir, you are too far gone," Reynolds did not
hesitate to retort, " I should have thought so
indeed, Sir, had I made such a speech as you
have now done." But the falling-out of these
faithful friends was always a renewal of love ;
and, in Reynolds' company, the Doctor once
unbent so far as to kick off his tight shoes and
run a race with a lady on a Devonshire lawn.
8o GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Both Johnson and Goldsmith were unintelli-
gent in respect of painting. Reynolds, however,
was certainly not dull in respect of literature.
It is recorded of him by Boswell, who dedicated
his great book to Reynolds, that he began to read
Johnson's essay on Savage one day when he was
leaning with his arm against a chimney-piece, and
that " not being able to lay down the book till
he had finished it, when he attempted to move
he found his arm totally benumbed." And he
could write as well as read. In addition to the
" Discourses," he left behind him two witty skits
on Johnson, showing how the Doctor could
maintain two flatly contradictory opinions on
two different occasions with equal warmth and
force.
At Leicester Square Reynolds reduced his
output of portraits and indulged his bent towards
imaginative pictures. Very often he combined
the two labours and placed real flesh-and-blood
sitters in fanciful surroundings. Thus in his
Hope nursing Love, Hope is a portrait of Miss
Morris, a hapless beauty of the day. The
Countess Waldegrave became T^ido embracing
Cupid ; Lord Vernon found himself in armour ;
THE STRAWBERRY GIRL
By
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
REYNOLDS 81
Mrs. Blake was Juno receiving the Cestus from
Venus ; Lady Sarah Bunbury was shown sacrificing
to the Graces ; the Duchess of Manchester and
her son figured as Diana disarming Cupid ; and
Miss Beauclerk, as Una, reclined beside a lion in
a wood. The Strawberry Girl (of which there are
two copies, one Lord Lansdowne's and the other
at Hertford House) was his niece Theophila, or
" OfFy " Palmer, who succeeded " Renny dear "
as the painter's housekeeper.
Those who hold that academies have hindered
art more than they have helped it do not think
any the better of Reynolds on account of his
having been the first P. R. A. But the honour
was not of his seeking. Weary of the dis-
sensions which perpetually rent the Society of
Artists of Great Britain, he took no open part
in the activities which brought its successor, the
Royal Academy, into being. Years before he
had pleaded for a teaching body of artists, for
medals, travelling scholarships, a Diploma
Gallery, an annual show of pictures, and for
other ideals which are more or less realised at
Burlington House ; but the actual formation of
the Academy, in 1768, was not his work, and
82 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
his election as its first president took him by
surprise. " His name," said Burke, " seemed to
be made for the knightly addition," and it was
fitting that the man whom it is so hard to think
of as Mr. Reynolds should become Sir Joshua.
But neither the presidency of the Academy nor
the knighthood pleased him as much as an
honour bestowed upon him two years later, when
he was elected Mayor of Plympton. Still, all
that his hand found to do at the Academy he
did with his might, and he would have died
a richer and less worried man if the academicians
had passed him by. The " Discourses " were only
a small part of his presidential work. The
jealousies which attend artists in their public
relationships were never lacking. When Angelica
Kauffmann was made an academician it was said
(as, indeed, it is said to-day) that " his Angelica "
had not been chosen on her merits. Over an
election to the professorship of perspective,
friction became so hot that Reynolds once
resigned. There were pin-pricks from Gains-
borough who ceased to be an exhibitor besides
belittling the presidential dignity by painting
The Blue "Boy. When Romney's vogue began
REYNOLDS 83
tactless people coined the phrases " Romney
faction " and " Reynolds faction." Nor was the
oversight of the students all pleasure. To take
an instance, Sir Joshua once kindly lent his
grand picture of The Marlborough Family to a
young man named Powell who wished to copy it.
By bad luck the bailiffs swopped down upon
Powell's quarters and seized all the valuables
they could find, including the painted Marl-
boroughs. It was only by paying Powell's debt
in full that the painter could regain his own
picture.
As the slightly scandalous Hogarth had
painted altar-pieces, and had received as much
as five hundred guineas for his work at
St. Mary Redcliffe, it was only to be expected
that the knighted primate of official art in
England should attempt something in the way
of ecclesiastical decoration. Accordingly he pro-
posed that the Academy should ask leave to
adorn St. Paul's Cathedral with paintings and
sculpture. West, Barry, Cipriani, Dance, and
Angelica Kauffmann were chosen as the Presi-
dent's helpers. The King, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Dean of the cathedral, and the
84 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Lord Mayor heartily supported the scheme.
But Dr. Terrick, the Bishop of London, would
have none of it. " I would rather close the
doors of the cathedral for ever," said this free
and enlightened prelate, " than open them to
admit Popery." If the episcopal ghost has
visited the modern reredos, the cracks which
have lately menaced St. Paul's are explained.
Baulked at St. Paul's, Sir Joshua found his
opportunity at Oxford. If his Nativity window
in the west wall of the New College ante-chapel
cannot be called a triumphant success, most of
the fault must be laid at the glass-man's rather
than at the painter's door. Reynolds' idea of
making all the light proceed from the Babe was
borrowed from Correggio, but he made it his
own. In the National Gallery may be seen
another of his religious works, the favourite
Heads of Angeh , in which the face of Frances
Isabella, daughter of Lord William Gordon, is
five times repeated. As for his Samuel, this
childish form and upturned face became so
popular that no Evangelical home was complete
without the engraving or the cast which re-
called it. But it is by his Virgin and Child^ past
REYNOLDS 85
which the twentieth-century visitor is hurried
by the butler at Petworth, that Reynolds ranks
highest as a religious painter.
These exercises in stained-glass and religious
painting were spread over the years 1778-87;
and when he finished the Virgin and Child
Reynolds was a man of sixty-four. Yet he was
still advancing in his art. The grand Mrs.
Siddons as the Tragic Muse and the delicious
Duchess of Devonshire and her Daughter were
both painted after he had passed three-score
years. So was the virile portrait of Lord
Heathfield ; and the picture of Sheridan, one of
the most masterly of all his achievements, was
wrought when the artist was nearer seventy than
sixty. Meanwhile, he went on drawing material
profit from his labour and enjoying his life. For
his Macbeth (a design for Boydell's Shakespeare)
he demanded and received a thousand guineas.
We read of his staying a fortnight at Belvoir
with the Duke and Duchess of Rutland. Even
the slight stroke of paralysis which tried to
smite him in 1782 was powerless against "the
invulnerable man," as Johnson called him ; for
Bath so swiftly cured him that in the year
86 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
following he painted Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic
Muse. Twelve months later, despite his Whig-
gery, he became " King's Painter," and a year
afterwards the Empress of Russia, who had
already rewarded the first volume of his " Dis-
courses on Art" with a diamond-encrusted golden
snuff-box, sent him fifteen hundred guineas for
his Infant Hercules. His world wagged well, and
he was grateful. " He appeared to me," said
Malone, his executor, " the happiest man I have
ever known."
But there is an end appointed to all things
and to all men. On Monday, July 13, 1789,
while he was working at a young lady's portrait,
the sight of his left eye suddenly became
darkened. He knew what it meant and laid
down his brushes. To Sheridan he wrote :
" The race is over, whether it is won or lost."
He painted no more. A little cleaning or mend-
ing of his pictures was all his cunning hand
could do when the guiding light was gone. But
his brain and his tongue were left to him, and
on December 10, 1790, he delivered his fifteenth
and last Discourse at the Royal Academy. It
was a hymn to his first love Michelangelo. Not
REYNOLDS 87
without a touch of resentment against the fate
which had compelled him to desert Michel-
angelo's high mountain-passes for the pretty
lanes and trim lawns of fashionable portrait-
painting, he solemnly charged the students to
have recourse to Michelangelo, so that they
might be " nursed in the lap of grandeur."
Here is the noble end of the whole Discourse:
It will not, I hope, be thought presumptuous in me
to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators,
but of his admirers. I have taken another course, one
more suited to my abilities and to the taste of the
times in which I live. Yet, however unequal I feel
to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again,
I would tread in the steps of that great master : to kiss
the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his
perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for
an ambitious man.
I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capa-
ble of such sensations as he intended to excite. I re-
flect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear
testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man ;
and I should desire that the last words which I should
pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might
be the name of Michael Angelo.
He ceased. Himself and every one of his
hearers knew that the last words Reynolds would
88 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
ever pronounce in that Academy from that place
were indeed " Michael Angelo." He descended
from the chair. Edmund Burke stepped for-
ward, and, gripping the aged hand, repeated Mil-
ton's lines :
The angel ended, and in Adam's ear
So charming left his voice, that he awhile
Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear.
But after his long, sunny day, Reynolds* short
eventide was chill and dark. Johnson, Gold-
smith, Garrick nearly all his bosom friends
were dead. He busied himself sadly with John-
son's monument, only to meet with a mean
rebuff from his fellow-academicians. Even the
little Burney could not wholly rouse him from
his deepening despondency. He would pace a
room silently, a pet canary on his finger ; but
one morning the canary flew through the open
window, and, in spite of the old man's hours of
coaxing, did not return. The invulnerable man
was beaten at last, and he waited for death.
" Nothing," wrote Burke, " can equal the tran-
quillity with which he views his end. He con-
gratulates himself on it as a happy conclusion to
a happy life." On February 23, 1792, he passed
REYNOLDS 89
away in peace. The mourning for him was wide
and deep. His remains lay for some days in
state at the Royal Academy, and were finally
laid in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, in the
place which has since come to be known as
Painters' Corner.
GAINSBOROUGH
(1727-1788)
PHERE were brave men before Agamemnon ;
but one does not need to go back to the
misty days of Daedalus and Icarus in order to
find a forerunner, or a foreflyer, of Mr. Henry
Farman and Mr. Wilbur Wright. One fine
morning, in the eighteenth century, a little
crowd gathered round a summer-house near
Sudbury, in Suffolk, to see their local celebrity
" Scheming Jack " mount into the empyrean.
Unhappily the human eagle's copper wings were
unfaithful to their trust, and " Scheming Jack "
dropped like a stone into the nearest ditch.
" Scheming Jack's " full name was John Gains-
borough, and he was the elder brother of that
Thomas Gainsborough, the airiest and most bird-
like of English painters, who learned to fly in
a better sense than John had dreamed of.
Thomas Gainsborough never became a painter
90
GAINSBOROUGH 91
of supernaturalism, sojourning in mystical clouds;
yet he was never an earth-bound realist. Like
the winged things of his own leafy Suffolk, he
flashed hither and thither over plodders* heads,
but he always kept himself within sight and
smell of the warm fields and the scented gardens.
The Gainsboroughs were a clever family.
" Scheming Jack " invented a self-rocking cradle,
an annoying cuckoo that cuckooed all the year
round, and a wheel (probably a turbine) which
revolved in a bucket of still water. The Govern-
ment once rewarded him for an ingenious chro-
nometer of his making ; but his life was in-
effective, and his seven daughters had often
to face an empty larder in order that there should
be no dearth of brass and tin for his experiments.
Of another brother, Humphrey, it is said that
he was the true inventor of a steam-condenser
which was coolly pirated by James Watt. He
also made one of the first fire-proof safes. A
third brother, Robert, displayed his energy by
" eloping with his first wife."
Both the father and the mother of these
hopeful children were out of the worn groove
of middle-class Suffolk life. One of them
92 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
(nobody can decide which) was a Nonconformist,
Sudbury having been a stronghold of Indepen-
dency from Commonwealth times. As the
husband was skilful with the sword, and was
reputed to have been once nearly caught in the
act of smuggling a keg of brandy, he cannot
have been a Roundhead of a very orthodox
type. He was buried in Sudbury churchyard ;
but his wife, although her brother was certainly
a clergyman of the Established Church, was
buried under the shadow of the chapel. Their
son Humphrey he of the fire-proof safe and
the pirated condenser became an Independent
pastor, although the ministry of the Establish-
ment was open to him ; and, on the whole,
the household seems to have been rather more
"chapel" than "church." The point would
not be worth much discussion had not a
twentieth-century writer on Gainsborough made
it the text of a long pro-Puritan pleading
headed " Puritanism and Art." Probably the
most signal service rendered by Puritanism in
the moulding of the artist Gainsborough was to
impel him towards sensuous beauty by way of
reaction from Puritanism's non-human austerity.
GAINSBOROUGH 93
Its more clear effect upon him was to import an
element of truculence into his naturally generous
and kindly character. Perhaps a great deal of
his lamentable estrangement from Reynolds is
to be explained by that " I-won't-be-patronised "
: where no
I ..-wishers.
t; for painting
;:ick " as well
^ed so far in
for the new
: | masterpiece
^s. "Make
| will fasten
jj worth ten
i|ed, and the
ijight of rain
<|d from the
q fasten him
turned out
94 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
he practised drawing all over his books. On
holidays it was his delight to set off with paper
and pencil into the woods and lanes, and when
holidays did not come of their own accord he
would plead with his parents for notes of excuse.
After a time his father put down a decisive foot
and insisted that the lad should stick to his
lessons. The sequel was stupefying. Thomas
used his skill as a copyist to fabricate a note in
the paternal handwriting, which ran " Give
Tom a holiday." So well did the trick succeed
that Tom, in a spare hour, is said to have pre-
pared an advance supply of similar " Give-Tom-
a-holiday" notes, which he hid in a brass
warming-pan. When a cold snap came un-
expectedly and the pan was opened the father
cried out in horror, " Tom will be hanged ! "
As he lived in days when men often swung
for stealing a sheep from a field or picking
a pocket of five shillings, his fears were
substantial. But when he saw some of the
drawings which the little forger had made
during his truancies, he added, " Tom will be a
genius/'
Gainsborough's corner of Suffolk was inferior
GAINSBOROUGH 95
to Constable's ; but it was nevertheless a fine
work - ground for an artist who, of all the
glorious line of English landscape-painters, was
the first to study nature in the open air. Sud-
bury itself to use the slang of water-colourists
was a " bitty " place. Fulcher, Gainsborough's
biographer, says with mid- Victorian scorn: "The
dilapidated and ancient buildings which . . . en-
cumbered and disfigured the streets of his native
town were, in the eyes of the Painter, positive
beauties. ... Its then unpaved thoroughfares
were, at irregular intervals, encroached upon by
uncouth porches ornamented with carvings still
more uncouth, antediluvian monsters and zool-
ogy-defying griffins, whose antiquity was their
only recommendation." But, to compensate
Tom for the absence of factory-chimneys, tele-
phone-wires, and sky-signs, his father's orchard
was overlooked by the picturesque ruins of the
palace built by Simon of Sudbury, the unfortu-
nate Archbishop of Canterbury who was be-
headed by Wat Tyler's mob. As well as the
ruins there was the River Stour flowing, as
Fulcher neatly puts it, in Hogarth's line of
beauty to the sea.
96 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
The orchard was the scene of Tom's first
triumph as a portrait-painter. One day at sun-
rise he was busily sketching an old tree when
the slanting light of the sun showed him the
eager face of a local ne'er-do-well who was about
to climb the fence and steal the pears. At sight
of the sketcher the thief took to his heels ; but
Tom straightway returned to the house and
made so speaking a likeness of the runaway that
old Gainsborough at once recognised him and
commanded his presence. At first the fellow
denied his guilt ; but when he was confronted
with his portrait he made a full confession.
The proud artist thereupon shaped a board like
a man's head and shoulders, and painted " Tom
Peartree" upon it in so life-like a manner that
people who saw it stuck upon the fence mistook
it for a living man. This curiosity still exists,
and was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in
1885.
Thomas, as his father had perceived, was a
genius ; but even a genius must learn his trade.
Accordingly he was sent, in 1741, to London,
where he worked first under Hubert Gravelot,
and afterwards under Hayman. Hayman was a
GAINSBOROUGH 97
pupil of Brown, 1 whose master had been Sir
James Thornhill, Hogarth's father-in-law, and
he was able to teach a young man from the
country many things less edifying than draughts-
manship. Hayman became a colleague of
Hogarth in decorating the Vauxhall Gardens
supper-boxes ; but he found the Gardens slow
in comparison with such delights as prize-fight-
ing, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, and getting in-
gloriously drunk. In spite of such influences
Gainsborough remained the most refined of
painters, so far as his canvases were concerned ;
but it was probably Hayman who taught him
the wretched habit of low cursing and swearing
which defiled too much of his correspondence
and conversation. After three years of Hayman,
Gainsborough took rooms in Hatton Garden, and
tried to make his own living. He asked three
1 Dallaway, in his addenda to Walpole's "Anecdotes of Painting," says :
" Highmore relates an anecdote of Brown, when engaged with Thornhill [in
decorating the cupola of St. Paul's]. They worked together upon a
scaffold, which was an open one. Thornhili had just completed the head
of the apostle, and was retiring backwards in order to survey the effect,
heedless of the imminent danger. As he had just reached the edge, Brown,
not having time to warn him, snatched up a pencil [brush] full of colour
and dashed it upon the face. Thornhill, enraged, ran hastily forward,
exclaiming, 'Good God ! What have you done?' 'I have only saved
your life,' was the satisfactory reply."
G
98 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
and five guineas for portraits, but was glad
enough to let the dealers have his drawings for
as little as seven shillings apiece. In his day, as
in our own, Hatton Garden was the head-
quarters of Italian plaster-cast vendors, and
tradition has it that copies of a marvellous old
horse of Gainsborough's modelling were sold in
the Garden shops. But neither paint nor plaster
paid the youth's expenses; and, in 1745, he
returned to the peace and freshness of Suffolk.
He was eighteen years old and, according to
Fulcher, " handsome, of a fair complexion,
regular features, tall, well-proportioned. His
forehead, though not high, was broad and
strongly marked, his nose Roman, his mouth
and eye denoting humour and refinement ; the
general expression of his face thoughtful, though
not altogether pleasant. The most casual ob-
server must have seen that much lay there ;
one gifted with greater insight would have said
also that something was wanting, though few
would have affirmed what."
Mr. Cobbold, of Ipswich, possesses a large
landscape executed by Gainsborough at this
time. It is an insincere but engrossing work.
GAINSBOROUGH 99
Imitating those Dutchmen who recoiled from
the flatness of Netherland scenery into wild
exaggerations of waterfalls and crags and ravines
and the other features of an accidente country,
Gainsborough has crowded his canvas with the
most incongruous objects. High-gabled Dutch
houses are perched on Italian rocks, while
English sheep and cattle and rustics fill the
foreground. One looks at it with some plea-
sure, but mainly with thankfulness that the
youth in due time returned to himself and to
nature. " The Suffolk ploughmen," we are
told, " often saw him in the early morning,
sketch-book in hand, brushing with hasty steps
the dew away."
With romantic inaccuracy, Allan Cunningham,
in his "Lives of the British Painters" (1829),
thus narrates the luck which befell Gainsborough
in his nineteenth year :
It happened in one of his pictorial excursions
among the woods of Suffolk that he sat down to make
a sketch of some fine trees, with sheep reposing below
and wood-doves roosting above, when a young woman
entered unexpectedly upon the scene, and was at once
admitted into the landscape and the feelings of the
artist. The name of this young lady was Margaret
ioo GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Burr ; she was of Scotch extraction and in her six-
teenth year, and to the charms of good sense and good
looks was added a clear annuity of two hundred
pounds. These are matters which no writer of
romance could overlook, and were accordingly felt by
a young and ardent and susceptible man. Nor must
I omit to add that country rumour conferred other
attractions. She was said to be the natural daughter
of one of our exiled princes, nor was she, when a wife
and a mother, desirous of having this circumstance
forgotten. On one occasion of household festivity,
when her husband was high in fame, she vindicated
some little ostentation in her dress by whispering to
her niece, " For you know, my love, I am a prince's
daughter."
According to the much more reliable Fulcher,
a Sudbury man, Miss Burr's brother was a
commercial traveller, in the crape-and-shroud
trade, for Gainsborough's father. In Fulcher's
time the tradition of the girl's extraordinary
beauty persisted in Sudbury. Fulcher adds :
"That a beautiful girl should wish to have her
portrait painted by her brother's young friend
naturally followed as cause and effect. The
sittings were numerous and protracted, but the
likeness was at last finished. . . . The young
lady expressed her warm admiration of the
GAINSBOROUGH 101
painter's skill, and in doing so gave him the
gentlest possible hint that perhaps in time he
might become the possessor of the original."
For the last of the foregoing sentences Ful-
cher has been taken to task. It is true that
1746 was not a leap year; yet his story may
have something in it. To ask, rather than to
be asked, in marriage is one of the prerogatives
of royal maids where commoners are concerned ;
and, which is more to the point, a boy of
nineteen with no income would need a little
encouragement before proposing to take posses-
sion of a lady with two hundred a year. That
the 200 existed is beyond a doubt. It was
paid mysteriously, through solicitors, all the
forty-two years of Gainsborough's married life.
The most plausible theory of its origin is that
Miss Burr was a daughter of the youth Wrio-
thesley, who, had he lived, would have been
seventh Duke of Bedford". This Bedford con-
nection was distinctly asserted in 1818 by Mr.
Thomas Green, of Ipswich ; and, at the show
of Gainsborough's pictures at the Grosvenor
Gallery in 1885, the resemblance of Mrs.
Gainsborough to John, seventh Duke of Bed-
102 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
ford, impressed many beholders of their por-
traits. It is also known that Gainsborough
wrote to this Duke of Bedford with a familiarity
which seems to imply some kind of relationship.
After the wedding the young pair dwelt for
a little while with the bridegroom's parents.
But they soon set up housekeeping on their own
account ; first in Sudbury, and a few months
later in Brook Street, Ipswich. Although the
annual rent of the Brook Street house was only
six pounds, Gainsborough's commissions did not
seem likely to defray it. There was a gleam of
hope one day when a rich squire in the neigh-
bourhood sent for the young artist. When he
arrived at the house, thinking that he was to
depict its beauties, Gainsborough had to listen
to a diffuse account of the mansion's broken
panes and perishing fences, until he must have
begun to think that his patron was like Oliver
Cromwell, who insisted that a wart should have
due prominence in his portrait. Finally the
squire came to the point by asking Gains-
borough's estimate for sprucing-up the whole
place. He had taken the painter to be a painter
and glazier !
GAINSBOROUGH 103
In 1747, two years before Reynolds' meeting
with Commodore Keppel, Gainsborough met the
man who was to be his first considerable patron.
But while Keppel was a generous and strong
man, Philip Thicknesse was quarrelsome and
spiteful. " Tom Peartree," who had been
transported to Ipswich by his creator, effected
the introduction. Thicknesse was Lieutenant-
Governor of Landguard Fort. Walking one
day with the local editor, he "perceived a
melancholy- faced countryman with his arms
locked together, leaning over the garden wall."
To quote Thicknesse's own words :
I pointed him out to the printer, who was a very
ingenious man, and he with great gravity of face, said
the man had been there all day, and that he pitied
him, believing he was either mad or miserable. I
then stepped forward with an intention to speak to the
madman, and did not perceive till I was close up that
it was a wooden man painted upon a shaped board.
Nowadays, when the chief concern of many
biographers is to differ from their predecessors,
Thicknesse is being held up as an unjustly
abused person. Thicknesse, however, has
settled the matter by his own letters and
104 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
memoirs. In his will he directed that his right
arm should be cut off and sent to his son " to
remind him of his duty to God, seeing that he
had failed in his duty to his father." His
quarrelsomeness once cost him a fine of ^300.
" He was perpetually imagining insult, and would
sniff injury from afar. Contention was essential
to his existence." In his patronage of Gains-
borough, whom he claimed to have discovered,
he wore the airs of a Maecenas. Yet it cannot
be denied that whatever Thicknesse's spirit and
motives may have been, he played as influential
a part in Gainsborough's life as Keppel played
in Reynolds'. It was Thicknesse who first
caused a Gainsborough picture to be engraved.
This was the breezy Harwich^ with Landguard
Forf, the original of which soon succumbed
to the damp of a wall on which Thicknesse
hung it.
The years were slipping away. Gainsborough's
thirtieth birthday came and went, and he was
still practically unknown outside his Suffolk
circle. People called him in to portray their
faces or their houses at small fees, and the re-
sultant canvases were generally in the tight and
THE MARKET-CART
By
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
From the Painting in the National Gallery
GAINSBOROUGH 105
correct manner which the patrons expected. In
a few cases the painter broke loose, as in his
Lady and Gentleman in a Landscape. Occasionally
an almost French grace appears in these early
pictures ; but, broadly speaking, Gainsborough
of Ipswich would have been forgotten a hundred
years ago had he not grown up into Gains-
borough of Bath.
Bath just then was almost at its best. Beau
Nash had been forced to give up his preposterous
coach and circus horses ; but, as Beau Nash had
always done the town a little more harm than
good, Bath increased while the Beau decreased.
Again, owing to the international unrest, not
many English people were visiting spas abroad.
Accordingly, Bath was filled with belles and
dandies and consequential people who thought
little more of going to the portrait-painter than
a modern actress thinks of going to the photo-
grapher. In short, Bath was the place where,
with luck and industry, a painter might look for
money and reputation.
There seems to be truth in Thicknesse's
boast that it was he who drew Gainsborough
from frugal and sleepy Ipswich to the city of
106 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
extravagance and frivolity. Fulcher says that
the move was made in 1760 the year when
Sir Joshua Reynolds migrated to Leicester
Square, giving a grand ball and setting up a
gilt chariot to advertise the fact. It is more
likely that Gainsborough, after a trial trip in
1758, took the decisive step in 1759. Thus
England gained her greatest painter in the
year of her losing Handel. For it cannot be
denied that Bath did as much for Gainsborough
as Rome had done for Reynolds. In the
country houses of Somerset immortal pictures
were to be seen, and the Suffolk man's eyes
were speedily opened to the wonders of Van
Dyck. Van Dyck could do many things which
were for ever out of Gainsborough's range : but
the brightest beam in his glory as a portrait-
painter is that he inspired a disciple who became
even greater than his master.
Gainsborough, or Thicknesse, or both of them
together, knew that Bath was not to be conquered
by hole-and-corner methods. They boldly en-
gaged rooms in the newly built Circus, in a
house which has lately been distinguished by
a mural tablet. When Mrs. Gainsborough,
GAINSBOROUGH 107
fresh from her six-pound house in Ipswich,
learned the rent she fell into a panic. " Fifty
pounds a year ! " she cried. " Mr. Gainsborough,
are you going to throw yourself into gaol?"
But Thicknesse explained the position and (so
he says) gave undertakings which calmed the
lady down. Further, he suggested that he
should graciously allow his own countenance
to be painted forthwith "as a decoy-duck" to
tempt other witty and handsome sojourners in
Bath to Gainsborough's studio. A portrait of
Thicknesse was begun : but, so far as its use
as an advertisement was concerned, Gainsborough
had no occasion to finish it. From the outset
sitters flocked in, probably more on account
of Gainsborough's exploits during his trial visit
of the previous season than of Thicknesse's
social connections. The price for a head was
advanced almost immediately from five guineas
to eight; with the usual result of whetting the
sitters' appetites still more keenly. Later on,
Gainsborough usually asked and received fifty
guineas for a half-length, and for a whole-length
a hundred.
Gainsborough's life falls into four almost
roS GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
equal divisions of about fifteen years each. He
was in his fifteenth year when he left Sudbury to
learn his craft in London. He was thirty-one
when he began the siege of Bath. At Bath he
remained just fifteen years ; and, he had been
a little more than fourteen years in London
when he was laid in the churchyard at Kew. Of
these four terms the years at Bath were not the
least happy. Although Gainsborough would
have been like a fish out of water in the
deliberately clever company of Reynolds and
Johnson, he had a rustic's delight in the town.
The theatre was his joy, and many actors were
among his friends. He painted Garrick, who,
happily for posterity, loved sitting to as many
artists of eminence as possible. General Palmer,
the manager of the Bath theatre, occasionally
gave Gainsborough a box, and received in return
two or three pictures which would now be worth
a whole year's takings. As for music, he could
play passably on several instruments : and, as
one might expect from the subtlety of his
painting, he hated the pianoforte and harpsi-
chord and indeed all those keyboard instruments
which, while calling many splendid compositions
GAINSBOROUGH 109
into existence, have been injurious to music as a
whole. He knew the Linleys, the leaders of
musical Bath, and he rose to the top of his talent
in painting that beautiful and unhappy Miss
Linley who became the wife of Sheridan.
Another musician friend was Jackson of Exeter,
whose "Te Deum in F" is still too often sung.
Gainsborough, indeed, was sometimes music-
mad. It was over a rare old viol-di-gamba that
he quarrelled with Thicknesse.
Happy in his friends and pleasures Gains-
borough was also happy in his work. Like
everybody else he grumbled sometimes, saying,
" I'm a landscape painter, and yet they will come
to me for portraits." But the proof that he did
not find his daily work a bore is found in the
work itself. The mere putting of the pigments
on the canvas is done with a lightness and sure-
ness of touch which has never been equalled by
any rival, either in England or out of it. In
nearly all his pictures he saw what he wanted
to do and did it. It is said that he had
a painter's trick or two. For instance, after a
sitter had gone Gainsborough would close the
shutters, excluding all daylight except so much
no GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
as could struggle through one round hole, thus
assuring himself that his central pictorial idea
was being clearly expressed. Some say that he
confined this patch of light to the sitter's face
while he was actually painting ; also that he
would work with brushes six feet long so that he
could stand still, with the canvas and the sitter
at exactly equal distances from him. There are
many of his finest works to which these legends
can hardly apply, but, whatever his processes,
the fact remains that Gainsborough's things of
beauty were joys in the making as well as joys
for ever. What Reynolds once said of Velasquez
is true of Gainsborough : " What we are all at-
tempting to do with great labour, he does at
once."
Gainsborough had his limitations : but, as he
was himself aware of them, they caused him
hardly any unhappiness. Ideal and historical
painting were beyond him. He needed the inspir-
ation of a living and breathing man or woman be-
fore his eyes. Almost his sole lapse was when he
tried, at Garrick's suggestion, to paint an ideal
portrait of Shakespeare. He set to work with
the sound intention of "taking the form from the
GAINSBOROUGH m
Bard's pictures and statues, just enough to pre-
serve his likeness past the doubt of all blockheads
at first sight," and of " supplying a soul from his
works." But he was swift to detect his own
failure and wrote to Garrick :
I have been several days rubbing in and rubbing out
my design of Shakespeare, and hang me if I think I
shall let it go or let you see it at last. I was willing,
like an ass as I am, to expose myself a little out of the
simple portrait way, and had a notion of showing
where that inimitable poet had his ideas from, by an
immediate ray darting down upon his eye turned up
for that purpose ; but, confound it, I can make nothing
of my ideas, there has been such a fall of rain from
the same quarter. You shall not see it, for I will cut
it before you can come. . . . Shakespeare's bust is a silly
smiling thing, and I have not sense enough to make
him more sensible in the picture, and so I tell ye, you
shall not see it. I must make a plain picture of him,
standing erect, and give it an old look, as if it had been
painted at the time he lived ; and there we shall fling
Shakespeare was soon abandoned. Diana and
Act<eon y now at Windsor Castle, was left un-
finished ; and the National Gallery Musidora y
which is said to be Gainsborough's only other
attempt at a classical picture, was probably not
H2 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
a classical picture at all but a portrait of Emma
Lyon, afterwards Lady Hamilton, of whom some-
thing must be said in the chapter on Romney.
Similarly in his landscapes Gainsborough was not
successful when he depicted ruins and mountains
" all made up out of his own head." His genius
consisted in his facing real human beings or real
Nature with exquisite sensibility towards their
pictorial qualities and in the supreme facility with
which he recorded what he saw. To painters his
brushwork is one of the wonders of the world ;
to laymen his colour is a banquet of delicious-
ness. Yet this is not the whole of his greatness.
Gainsborough's intuition was as effective as
Reynolds' intellect ; and such pictures as the
Perdita (Mrs. Robinson) in the Wallace Collection,
and Mrs. Richard Sheridan in the possession of
Lord Rothschild, show how deeply he could
enter into the most sacred places of human
hearts. In short his blithely executed, deliciously
coloured, sympathetically conceived portraits
fulfil Milton's definition of poetry a definition
which is t~ue of all the arts. Gainsborough's
masterpieces are " Simple, sensuous, passionate."
Events at last conspired to drag Gainsborough
MRS. ROBINSON (" PERDITA ")
By
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
GAINSBOROUGH 113
away from Bath. He had been elected a Royal
Academician. Reynolds was receiving a smaller
number of sitters, and Romney was becoming
the painter of the hour. Friction with Thick-
nesse warmed up the always hot-tempered artist
to such a point that Bath became intolerable.
The Thicknesse version is that Gainsborough
offered a hundred guineas for Mrs. Thicknesse's
viol-di-gamba with which he was in love, and
that Mr. and Mrs. Thicknesse gave him their
treasure without money and without price on
the understanding that he would let them have
Thicknesse's portrait. Gainsborough, they say,
kept the instrument, but not his promise ; and,
beyond roughing-in the beginnings of Thick-
nesse's form with a dog at his side, he did
nothing. After many days Mrs. Thicknesse
caught sight of the unfinished canvas, and was
so shocked at her half-painted spouse's uncanny
appearance that she burst out crying and begged
that the thing might be hidden at once in the
attic. To the attic it went, and at the same
time Gainsborough returned the viol-di-gamba.
The tiff was apparently ended by Gainsborough's
admitting his fault and offering to finish the
H4 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
portrait in his very best manner. But when
nine months passed without another brushful
of paint reaching its surface Mrs. Thicknesse
broke out once more and wrote to Gains-
borough, asking him to " take his brush and
first rub out the countenance of the warmest
and truest friend he ever had, and so done,
then blot him for ever from his memory."
The Gainsborough version is different. It hints
that the painter had secretly paid the lady her
hundred guineas when her husband was not
looking a defence which is far worse than the
indictment. This version adds that Thicknesse,
in his intolerable boastings, had given it out in
Bath that Gainsborough's children, before their
lucky father fell in with so noble and discerning
a patron, used to run ragged in the streets of
Ipswich. The truth seems to be that everybody
was more or less in the wrong. Mrs. Gains-
borough and Thicknesse disliked one another.
The two men had hasty tempers, and the two
women had tongues. One or other of the
families had to leave Bath, and it was the Gains-
boroughs who went.
Schomberg House, Pall Mall, where they
GAINSBOROUGH 115
chose their London dwelling, is strong in
memories of painters. The building was divided
into three parts, the central one of which was
occupied by Astley, 1 and afterwards by that far
better artist, Richard Cosway. One wing be-
came Gainsborough's, while the rest of the house,
from 1781 onwards, housed the quack doctor
Graham, with his mud-baths and his beautiful
Emma Lyon. Perhaps from magnanimity,
perhaps from fussiness, Thicknesse sought to
prepare Gainsborough's way by commendatory
letters to lords. But his services were hardly
needed. Gainsborough's reputation was well
established.
Reynolds duly called at Schomberg House,
although Gainsborough had ceased sending
pictures to the Academy ; but Gainsborough
did not return the visit. His neglect may have
been mere slackness, but it is more probable
that a rather weak affectation of manly inde-
pendence was at the root of it. Besides this,
there was a complicated difference between the
two artists. Reynolds, although a Whig in
1 See page 65. Having married money, " Beau " Astley no longer needed
to mend his waistcoats with painted waterfalls.
n6 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
politics, posed as an academic in art, while
Gainsborough, a free-lance in art, was a Tory
in politics. The Court, which was cold to
Reynolds, took up Gainsborough effusively.
" Doubtless portraiture is a tantalising art no
pleasing your sitters, hey ? " the King said one
day. " All wanting to be Venuses and Adonises,
hey ? Well, Mr. Gainsborough, since you have
taken to portraiture I suppose every one wants
your landscapes, hey ? Is it not so ? " After
nine years' residence in London, Gainsborough
was able to exhibit no less than fifteen heads of
the King and Queen and their family. Later
on he brought several princesses into his magni-
ficent picture The Matt, St. James's Park, of which
Horace Walpole 1 wrote : " You would suppose
it would be stiff and formal, with the straight
rows of trees and people sitting on benches. It
is all in motion and in a flutter like a lady's
fan."
Along with many others, Fulcher believed that
the wonderful Blue Boy, now in the collection of
the Duke of Westminster, was intended as a
1 Not Northcote, as stated by Hazlitt.
GAINSBOROUGH n?
slap at Reynolds. In his Eighth Discourse
Reynolds said :
It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably ob-
served that the masses of light in a picture be always
of a warm, mellow colour yellow, red, or a yellowish
white ; and that the blue, the grey, or the green
colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses,
and be used only to support and set off these warm
colours ; and for this purpose a small proportion of
cold colours will be sufficient. Let this conduct be
reversed ; let the light be cold, and the surrounding
colours warm, as we often see in the works of the
Roman and Florentine painters, and it will be out of
the power of Art, even in the hands of Rubens or
Titian, to make a picture splendid or harmonious.
The popular tradition fondly imagines that
Gainsborough's brush demolished Reynolds'
dogma by building up a " splendid and har-
monious " picture in which the cold colour blue
supplies the central interest. But the millions
of people who have looked at The Blue Boy
while he has hung at the Franco-British Exhi-
bition have had their chance of seeing that the
Boy is not so very blue after all. As Leslie,
echoing Sir Thomas Lawrence, says in his
" Handbook for Young Painters " :
In this picture the difficulty is rather ably combated
than vanquished. Indeed, it is not even fairly com-
n8 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
bated, for Gainsborough has so mellowed and broken
the blue with the other tints that it is no longer the
pure bleak colour Sir Joshua meant ; and, after all,
though the picture is a very fine one, it cannot be
doubted that a warmer tint would have made it still
more agreeable to the eye.
The latest searchers, however, lean to the
opinion that The Blue Boy was painted nine
years before Reynolds publicly pronounced his
dictum. It has even been suggested that, instead
of Gainsborough answering Reynolds' lecture,
Reynolds was answering Gainsborough's picture.
Similar obscurity hangs over his so-called
Duchess of Devonshire, the work by which the
artist is best known to the non-artistic public.
The fact that this canvas was sold in 1876 for
; 1 0,605, that it was stolen from Agnews' a
day or two after they bought it, and, above all,
that it represents her supposed Grace in an
enormous Gainsborough or " picture " hat, en-
deared the "Lost Duchess" to millions of
people who would walk past the divine Morning
Walk (Squire Halle tt and his Wife) with hardly a
moment's pause. Probably the " Lost Duchess "
was not a Duchess at all. Worse still, she is
not supremely well painted ; and, now that she
THE MORNING WALK
QUIRE HALLETT AND HIS WIFE)
By
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
From the Original Sketch
f
GAINSBOROUGH 119
has been found, Mr. Pierpont Morgan is wel-
come to her.
In his London portraits, Gainsborough pushed
his method as far as it would go. Just as
Gothic architecture became more and more
soaring and airy until, in buildings like La
Sainte Chapelle in Paris and the cathedral of
Leon in Spain, it was little more than stained-
glass held upright by slender shafts of stone,
so Gainsborough grew swifter and lighter every
day. The trees in his backgrounds ceased to
be elms or oaks or yews or poplars, and became,
as in Perdita^ vague vegetable foils for a woman's
wistful beauty. Had he lived longer, his latest
canvases would probably have been too full of
the defects of his qualities.
All this time, Gainsborough was making a lot
of money. He was also spending it. Yet, if
we are to believe the inevitable Thicknesse, who
had partly repaired the -breach, the painter was
not very happy. In the boastful memoir of Gains-
borough which Thicknesse hurriedly composed
on the morrow of^is friend's death we read :
But those who 0?fct loved Mr. Gainsborough and
whom he most loved were unfortunately least wel-
120 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
come to his house, his table, and the good-will of some
part of his family, for he seldom had his own way but
when he was roused to exert a painful authority for
it, and then he flew into irregularities and sometimes
into excess ; for, when he was once heated, either by
passion or wine, he continued unable and unwilling
also to do business at home, and at those times
squandered away, fifty times over, the money which
an extra joint of meat or a few bottles of port would
have cost to have entertained his friends at home.
I mention this because, had it not been for such
pitiful doings, he would still have been in all human
probability the delight of his friends and the admira-
tion of the world for years to come. He had so utter
a disregard for money that somebody smuggled up in a
few years at Bath five hundred pounds.
Those who have sat to Mr. Gainsborough know
that he stood, not sat, at his palette, and consequently,
of late years at least, five or six hours' work every
morning tired him exceedingly, and then, when he
went into the Park for a little fresh air or up in the
city upon business, if he took a hackney coach to ease
his tired limbs back again, he was obliged to be set
down in St. James's Square, or out of sight of his
own windows, for fear of another set down not so
convenient either to his head or his heels as riding out
twelve pennyworth of coach-hjjp after having earned
fifty guineas previously thereto^
I have more than once bee? set down by him in
that manner, even when I was going to dine with
GAINSBOROUGH 121
him, and have more than once been told by him 'why
ive 'were so set down. If, therefore, I have told this
tale so severely, let it be remembered I have lost a
friend whom I sincerely loved, and . . . Let the
stricken deer go weep.
Although what women call cattishness is writ
large over this pitiable passage, Thicknesse's
modern apologists are taking it very seriously.
Yet it is surely easy to read between the lines.
As the maker, or abettor, of so much mischief
in Bath, Thicknesse would hardly be welcome
to Mrs. Gainsborough on the new hearth in
London. As for the suggestion that she had
" made a purse " in Bath, it was both her right
and her duty to do so. During the two-and-
forty years of her married life, ^8400 came
in from her annuity, and probably six times
as much more from her husband's painting ;
yet Gainsborough left hardly any money behind
him. At Bath she had to busy herself with
what their father called " the dusty work of
finding husbands" for his two daughters, who
were nearer thirty than twenty when they were
taken, still unmarried, to London. As for the
nature of the domestic atmosphere, Fulcher
122 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
has preserved an account of it different from
Thicknesse's. He says :
Whenever Gainsborough spoke crossly to his wife,
a remarkably sweet-tempered woman, he would write
a note of repentance, sign it with the name of
his favourite dog Fox, and address it to his Margaret's
pet spaniel Tristram. Fox would take the note in
his mouth and duly deliver it to Tristram. Margaret
would then answer, " My own dear Fox, you are
always loving and good, and I am a naughty little
female ever to worry you as I often do, so we will
kiss and say no more about it."
Tradition further declares that Gainsborough's
delight was to spend long evenings at his wife's
side, making drawing after drawing.
One often meets men whose hearts absence
does not make fond. To friends who are
within an arm's length they are embarrassingly
generous, while to other friends who have
drifted into the next parish they are negli-
gent or hypercritical or downright quarrelsome.
There was occasionally something of this about
Gainsborough. He would distribute drawings
and even paintings right and left on the smallest
pretext. That he should have bestowed paint-
ings on the Bath carrier who, out of pure love
GAINSBOROUGH 123
of art, had declined to take payment for con-
veying his works to London, was intelligible ;
but he also gave away drawings to acquaint-
ances merely to shut their mouths while music
was being played. Yet he could be a miser
of his time and talent in cases where he should
have been lavish. He himself begged Reynolds
to sit to him in 1782 ; but, like Thicknesse's,
the portrait was left alone after a single sitting.
In his dealings with the Royal Academy
" My dear Fox " was a very naughty Dog.
Indeed, he was much less like the sleek and
meek Pomeranian in his Perdita than like the
upper of his Two Fighting Dogs with a Shepherd-
Boy. Although he was an Academician, he
would attend no meetings and would perform
hardly any duties. More than once he with-
held his pictures from the annual show. In
1784 he finally broke from his brethren. Find-
ing them unwilling to waive in his favour a
regulation concerning the hanging of full-length
and three-quarter-length portraits, he discharged
at their heads the following ultimatum :
Mr. Gainsborough presents his compliments to the
gentlemen appointed to hang the pictures at the Royal
i2 4 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Academy, and begs leave to hint to them that if the
Royal Family, which he has sent for this Exhibition
(being smaller than three-quarters) we hung above the line
with full-lengths, he never more, whilst he breathes,
will send another picture to the Exhibition. This he
swears by God.
As he had offered to accept inferior positions for
his other pictures, and as it was truly vital to his
Royal Family that it should be hung only breast-
high, Gainsborough had a good case for concession.
But he wrote a bad letter. In his days, the ratio of
bad work in the Academy exhibition to the good
work excluded from it had not become such as to
justify any artist in flaunting his contempt for the
Academicians. There was too loud a ring of
" the dissidence of dissent " in Gainsborough's
whoop of defiance. With such a document before
it, the Academy could not give way; and Gains-
borough, as bad as his word, never sent in another
picture.
The Royal Academy had no monopoly of their
unruly member's disrespect. A story of the superb
Mrs. SiddonS) now in the National Gallery, makes
a piquant contrast with that other story, told in
the preceding chapter, of Sir Joshua and the hem
GAINSBOROUGH 125
of the divine Sarah's garment. Gainsborough
found the lady's features hard to draw and burst
out, " D your nose, Madam, there's no end
to it ! " To another sitter, a conceited alderman
who pleaded for a clear portrayal of a pretty
dimple on his chin, Gainsborough said, " Oh,
d your dimple ! I will paint neither it nor
you." Again, when he overheard an ignoble
nobleman vulgarly demanding if "that fellow
Gainsborough " had finished his likeness, he
slashed a brushful of paint across the canvas,
and said (at a dead loss of ^105), "Where is
that fellow now ? "
His tantrums did not sour the painter below
the surface. The secret betrothal of his daughter
Mary to an oboe player, followed by an unhappy
marriage and a separation, worried him; but he
extracted much pleasure from a tour of the Eng-
lish Lakes and from summers spent at Richmond.
Living at the rate of a thousand a year, he was,
nevertheless, open-handed towards distress; and
altogether he was doing a great deal with his life.
At the trial of Warren Hastings, in February,
1 78 8, Gainsborough was served with the summons
to go before a juster Judge than any. in West-
i26 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
minster Hall. An intense cold affected a spot on
his neck, about the size of a shilling; and he soon
learned that it was the print of Death's own finger.
The cancer, as his doctors called it, gav.e him half
a year to set his affairs in order. He met his fate
like a brave man.
About the end of July, when the end was near,
the unfinished portrait of Reynolds made a mute
appeal, and Gainsborough was filled with a desire
for reconciliation with his great brother, if not for
absolution from the supreme pontiff of English
art. With halting pen and failing brain he
penned this pathetic letter:
DEAR SIR JOSHUA, I am just to write what I fear
you will not read, after lying in a dying state six
months, the extreme affection which I am informed by
a friend which Sir Joshua has expressed induces me to
beg a last favour which is to come over under my roof
and look at my things. My Woodman you never saw.
What I ask now is not disagreeable to your feeling, that
I may have the honour to speak to you. I can from a
sincere Heart say that I always admired and sincerely
loved Sir Joshua Reynolds. _, ~
THOS. GAINSBOROUGH.
" My Woodman " was The Woodman in a Storm^
a picture which afterwards perished in a fire at
GAINSBOROUGH 127
Exton Park. Reynolds came. Into the sick-
room were brought some of the dying man's
favourite landscapes and the two painters discussed
their contents. " If any little jealousies had sub-
sisted between us/' says Reynolds nobly in his
Fourteenth Discourse, "they were forgotten in
those moments of sincerity." At last the moment
of parting came; and, as Sir Joshua bent over his
pillow, it is said that Gainsborough murmured,
"We are all going to Heaven and Van Dyck
is of the company."
ROMNEY
(1734-1802)
c TN art," said Jean Francis Millet, "you
must give your skin." He would have
been nearer to historical truth had he said that
the artist must be prepared to give his skin if
necessary. To take two examples from the
preceding chapters, Reynolds and Gainsborough
slept softly and warmly, and, if they had been so
minded, could have worn purple and fine linen
and feasted sumptuously every day. Of poor
George Romney, however, his skin was required.
He was born with a leaden spoon in his mouth ;
and when luck came his way it was too late to
bring him any solid happiness.
Overlooking Morecambe Bay, with the moun-
tains sheering up in the north and the sea filling
all the west, " Honest John " Romney lived as a
farmer and carpenter. He could make almost
anything, from a finely carven fiddle to an im-
128
ROMNEY 129
proved cart-wheel, from a pump to a new kind
of shell-fish manure. Unlike those honest folk
whose honesty is merely the best policy, he was
generous as well as just, often letting off his
debtors with a leniency which his creditors did
not imitate. He and his wife, like the Hogarths,
were of good yeoman or " statesman " blood.
Their third son, George, was born the day after
Christmas Day, 1734.
Upon William and James, the two elder sons,
was poured out all their parents could afford in
the way of a liberal education. Little George,
however, had to be content with a village
school where the fees for tuition amounted to
only five shillings a quarter. Making slow pro-
gress he was soon withdrawn, with the result
that he never learned to spell. But a copy of
Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting came his
way and taught him things better than ortho-
graphy. Indeed, in a provincial way and on a
very small scale, he resembled a little Leon-
ardo, inasmuch as he busied himself with archi-
tecture, music, engineering, and half a dozen
other crafts as well as painting. He further
emulated the Renaissance by trifling with
rso GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
alchemy and dreaming of the philosopher's
stone.
In 1755, a year which Reynolds spent in paint-
ing 1 20 sitters, the Reynolds of Kendal was one
Christopher Steele, who is said to have studied
in Paris under the excellent French artist Carlo
Vanloo. To impress his clients, Steele affected
such dandified and Frenchified manners that he
was agreeably nicknamed " the Count." His
lordship had room for an apprentice : and in
March, 1755, young George Romney was bound
to him for four years. The premium was twenty
pounds. Apparently the money did not last
Steele long : for within a year he was planning
an elopement with an heiress one of his pupils
to Gretna Green. The apprentice's first duties
were not confined to art. He was called upon to
take a busy part in arranging the Count's flight.
And it was this sorry business which originated
the tragedy of Romney's own life.
While the wedded fugitives were honeymoon-
ing on the safe side of the Border, Romney was
lying ill at his Kendal lodgings. Tradition says
that his sickness was directly due to the excite-
ment of his role in the elopement : but this does
ROMNEY 131
not affect the sequel. The landlady's daughter,
Mary Abbott, was both a devoted nurse and a
likeable young woman ; and the pair soon fell in
love.
At the beginning of the autumn, the " Count "
came back into England. Word was sent to
Romney that his master required his presence in
York, where he intended to settle down and
paint portraits. The lovers took counsel, and
decided to make sure of one another by getting
married before their separation took place.
Accordingly, on October 14, 1756, the knot was
tied which was to cut its cruel way down into
two hearts. A few days later the bridegroom set
out for York.
According to " the poet Hayley," the patron
of his later life and his first biographer, Romney
repented of this hasty marriage as soon as he
had leisure. He perceived that he had disabled
himself, and that he had thrown away the
mobility which counts for so much when one
takes the field in Art. Mary Abbott was of his
own station in life, but she seems to have
possessed no more than her natural share of
brains and temperament. Yet she was as great
132 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
as Romney, as the sequel will show. During
his exile in York she gave the first proof of
her lifelong faithfulness and self-sacrifice by-
supplying him with pocket-money, half a guinea
at a time, which she sent hidden in the sealing-
wax of her letters.
In judging Romney as a man and a husband,
one or two things must be weighed in his
defence. At the age of fifteen he had lain under
the influence of a certain John Williamson,
a watchmaker-alchemist, who had spent his
time and money on a process for transmuting
base metals into gold. Williamson firmly be-
lieved that his wife had cheated him of triumph.
For months his furnace had been kept ablast,
and at last the hour of the supreme test had
drawn near. But on this crucial afternoon
guests appeared and nothing would induce Mrs.
Williamson to excuse her husband from doing
the honours. Suddenly, while everybody was at
the tea-table, the furnace exploded. So bitter
was the alchemist's resentment that he could no
longer bear to remain in the same house with
the author of his disaster, and a complete separa-
tion followed. No doubt this tale, so often and
ROMNEY 133
so bitterly poured into his ear, would recur to
Romney when his own conjugal problem became
acute. Again, " Count " Steele was an unprin-
cipled Bohemian, who regarded women as alter-
nately tempting and tiresome creatures, to be
taken up or dropped at an artist's good pleasure,
and some seeds of this bad doctrine would lodge
in the apprentice's mind.
To his credit let it be said that Romney tried
for five years to make the best of married life.
Steele, of whose poor Countess we can discover
nothing more, was soon in Romney's debt to the
extent of ten pounds, all borrowed in small
sums from the little stock of money which poor
Mary's hard-earned half-guineas had gone to
swell. Under the indentures, the master was
bound to provide his apprentice with board and
lodging, as well as instruction in painting. The
advantages were therefore nearly all on Steele's
side when, in 1757, Romney induced him to
cancel their bargain, the master keeping both the
original premium and the ten pounds while the
apprentice merely regained his freedom.
At the age of twenty-two, with a wife and a
baby son dependent upon him, Romney set up
i34 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
in Kendal as a portrait-painter on his own
account. In return for all the sacrifices his
parents and his bride had made, he had received
only a few odds and ends of training from Steele.
At first he was glad to discharge the humblest
commissions. The earliest of them is said to
have been a hand holding a letter, which was
used as a window-sign at the Kendal post office.
But a gentle family of the neighbourhood, the
Stricklands of Sizergh, soon set him to worthier
work. At Sizergh there were two pictures
by Lely and Rigaud, 1 which he was allowed
to copy. One thing led on to another. The
Stricklands' friends and their friends* friends
called in the young painter's services, and, at
two guineas for a head and six guineas for a
whole length, he found enough work to keep
him alive.
But a born artist does not paint to live ; he
lives to paint. Romney felt that Rome alone
could raise him to his full height ; and although
so far-away a goal seemed out of reach, he bent
1 As Rigaud's talent is often misstated in England, the reader's atten-
tion may be drawn to his very fine Lulli and the Musicians of the French
Court, a good reproduction of which will be found in " Great Musicians,"
a companion volume to the present work.
ROMNEY 135
his mind to Paris, or, at the very least, London.
To waste his life in manufacturing portraits for
patrons who preferred the journeyman style
would be intolerable. But there was no " Centu-
rion " in Morecambe Bay and no Keppel to bid
him go aboard. He knew that he must help
himself. Occasionally he would refresh his own
mind and delight others' ears by playing on his
home-made fiddle, but nearly all his waking
hours were passed in hard efforts to lay shilling
on shilling and guinea on guinea. In addition to
portraits, he executed a few original compositions
and some oil-copies, or adaptations, of prints
after old masters. As buyers did not come
forward, he disposed of eight originals and
twelve copies by means of a public lottery. All
the eighty-two tickets were sold at half a guinea
each, and by 1762 Romney had hoarded up a
hundred guineas.
It was plain that the possession of a hundred
guineas would not justify Romney in removing
his whole family to London, where they might
easily starve before he could obtain a single
commission. Mrs. Romney therefore consented
to a division of forces. The hoard was equally
136 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
divided ; and while the wife and her two children
remained to hold the little fort at Kendal, the
husband mounted a horse and rode off to storm
London. Probably they parted in the belief that
Ro.mney would either soon fail, and return to
the North, or succeed and summon the others
to join him in the South. But the separation
lasted thirty-seven years. To be precise, Romney
left his wife in 1762, and did not revisit her
until 1765. After a second short stay in 1767,
he did not see her again for thirty years ; and
when he made his final journey northwards in
1799 he was a broken invalid, with only a few
pitiable months to live. So far as this sorry
business can be explained, the explanation will be
found in the after-course of the story.
Having looked up his old master Steele on
the way, Romney reached London towards the
end of March, 1762. A supposed highwayman
had given him a fright at one stage of his jour-
ney ; but he and his guineas arrived at the
Castle Inn safe and sound. From the inn he
removed first to lodgings in Dove Court, near
the Mansion House, and afterwards to Bear-
binder Lane. Many and great as were his faults,
MRS. ROBINSON (" PERDITA ")
By
GEORGE ROMNEY
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection.
ROMNEY 137
it is hard to repress a wave of sympathy for this
lonely, poor, ill-educated man, without a patron
or a letter of introduction, cutting up his be-
loved Death of Rizzio because the canvas was too
big to take to his second lodging. While he
was rejoiced to get three guineas for a three-
quarter-length portrait, Reynolds, with the rich
memories of his Italian tour to inspire him, was
already a considerable personage, with his coach
and his liveried servants and his great house in
Leicester Fields. At the same time, Gains-
borough, only seven years Romney's senior,
could hardly keep pace with the noble clients
who thronged round him at Bath.
The Society of Arts was offering premiums
for historical pictures ; and, in 1763, a blaze of
delight filled the solitary's heart at the news that
his Death of Wolfe had won fifty guineas the
second prize. But it was too good to be true.
The pedants upraised their voices. This new-
comer's Death of Wolfe^ they insisted, must be
disqualified. How could the gallant Wolfe's
glorious end be made the theme of a truly his-
torical painting, when it had occurred too
recently for any historian to record it ? Again,
138 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
how could a painting be historical in which the
soldiers wore contemporary uniforms instead of
Roman tunics ? The committee, ashamed of
their ignorance, reversed their own decision,
and awarded the second prize to another artist.
A consolation-prize, grandly called a " premium
extraordinary," of twenty-five guineas, was voted
to Romney ; and, later on, a banker paid a
further twenty-five guineas for the picture, and
sent it to Calcutta. Better still, the gossip to
which the affair gave rise brought Romney into
notice. Heads went up to five guineas, and he
was able to lay the foundations of a second
modest pile of guineas.
But the guineas were not being saved to hire
either a north-going horse for the artist, or a
south-coming coach for his family. By this time,
Mrs. Romney had left Kendal, and had been in-
stalled in the house of her husband's father.
The painter's mind was full of Paris, where so
many fine things were to be seen. In September,
1764, just eight autumns after Mary Abbott and
he had fallen in love, he reached the French
capital. For six weeks he roamed the galleries.
According to Hayley, the pictures that affected
ROMNEY 139
him most were the scenes from the life of
Marie de Medicis by Rubens. When one stands
before those hotly controverted masterpieces, in
the beautiful new room of the Louvre where
they are housed to-day, it is only by an effort
that one can recall Romney's reposeful and
pretty pictures. Probably his drawing towards
the immense exuberance of Rubens was like
Reynolds' worship of Michelangelo an affinity
of opposites.
Returning to London with an enlarged mind,
he invited the town to take him a little more
seriously. In a more imposing lodging, in
Gray's Inn, he painted a few legal luminaries, and
also competed once more for a Society of Arts
premium. This time he not only won a prize
of fifty guineas, but was allowed to keep it.
With this sum of money he paid his long-
deferred visit to his family. His little girl was
dead, and his only son was old enough to travel.
But Romney returned alone to London. After
his second visit, in 1767, he went back to the
metropolis and removed to a house called the
" Golden Head," in Great Newport Street, where
it would have been easy to accommodate his wife
140 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
and son ; but he left them in the North. Italy
was calling him.
Richard Cumberland, who had held high
office in Ireland but had sunk to a poor two
hundred a year, became Romney's mentor about
this time. " When I first knew Romney," he
says in his Memoirs, " he was poorly lodged in
Newport Street, and painted for the small price
of eight guineas for a three-quarter length. I
sat to him, and was the first who encouraged
him to advance his terms by paying him ten
guineas for his performance." He goes on to
explain that poor pay and poor lodgings did not
exhaust the list of Romney's sorrows. The
worst was that his sitters were mostly inartistic
burgesses who preferred wooden renderings of
vacuous faces to true portrait- painting. One
day, when Cumberland kindly brought Garrick
to the Newport Street studio, Romney was
caught fulfilling a commission from a Mr.
Leigh. Bulking over a large space, paterfamilias
and materfamilias with their six children were
displaying "a contented abstinence from all
expression of thought or action." As the
frequent sitter and intimate friend of Hogarth
ROMNEY 141
and Reynolds and Gainsborough and other
noted artists, Garrick could hardly be blamed
for accounting himself something of an art
critic ; and having " fixed his lynx's eyes " upon
the unfortunate group, he said to Romney,
" Upon my word, Sir, this is a very well-ordered
family, and that is a very bright well-rubbed
mahogany table at which that motherly good
lady is sitting, and this worthy gentleman in the
scarlet waistcoat is doubtless an excellent subject
to the State (I mean if all those are his children),
but not for your art, Mr. Romney, if you mean
to pursue it with that success which I hope will
attend you."
Romney meekly agreed, and at once turned
the picture with its eight blank faces to the wall.
Cumberland's own portrait was next shown.
" It is very well," said Garrick, " that is very
like my friend, and that blue coat with a red
cape is very like the one he has on ; but you
must give him something to do, put a pen in
his hand, a paper on his table, and make him a
poet. If you can once set him down to his
writing, who knows but in time he may write
something in your praise ? "
142 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Taking this excellent advice, Romney gave
his next sitters " something to do." In his Sir
George and Lady Warren and their Daughter, the
little girl was shown fondling a pet bird. Every-
body who saw this work fell in love with it, and
Romney began to be in request. But he sent
no pictures to the Royal Academy then hold-
ing its first annual show. At the Chartered
Society's exhibition, in 1770, he arrested visitors
by two figures called Mirth and Melancholy,
illustrating Milton's Ui/fllegro and // Penseroso.
A year later he showed his Mrs. Tates as the
Tragic Muse, and five other portraits. But his
method was still cold and unfree, and he knew
far better than Garrick or Cumberland or any
other counsellor that he had much to unlearn
and learn. By 1772, after ten years' hard labour
in London, he was making a thousand a year ;
and on March 20, 1773, the eleventh anniver-
sary of his first entering the capital, he quitted
it for Rome.
After so many years of sacrifice and of ardent
desire there was a danger of disappointment ;
but it is pleasant to find that Rome satisfied
Romney. How much he loved and worshipped
ROMNEY 143
it we can learn from the letter he wrote from
Venice to Carter, a fellow-student. Speak-
ing of his last view of the city from the top
of Mount Viterbo, he said :
I looked with an eager eye to discover that divine
place. It was enveloped in a bright vapour, as if
the rays of Apollo shone there with greater lustre
than at any other spot upon the terrestrial globe. My
mind visited every place, and thought of everything
that had given it pleasure ; and I continued some
time in that state, with a thousand tender sensations
playing about my heart, till I was almost lost in
sorrow. Think, oh, think, my dear Carter, where
you are, and do not let the sweets of that divine place
escape from you ; do not leave a stone unturned that
is classical ; do not leave a form unsought that is
beautiful j not even a line of the great Michael
Angelo.
Romney was well treated in " that divine
place." He held aloof from the other English
artists in Rome ; but leave to copy the most
famous works was given him. In addition to
innumerable memoranda, he made an elaborate
full-scale copy of the groups in the lower part
of Raphael's Transfiguration. At Florence he
was less favoured ; but Bologna honoured him
144 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
with an offer of the Presidency of the Academy
of Painting. In Venice he broke his rule of
aloofness to the extent of consorting with Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu's brilliant and worthless
son Edward. On the homeward journey he
passed again through France, of which he had
written on the outward journey :
The taste for painting, and the art itself are at the
lowest ebb ; simplicity they call vulgar . . . every-
thing must have the air of a dancer or actor, the
colour of a painted beauty, and the dress recommended
by the barber, tailor and mantua-maker. . . . The
French are a people that have no idea of simplicity
and are totally devoid of character and feeling. Nothing
can be a greater proof of their degeneracy of taste
than the indifference with which they treat everything
produced by those great masters who have held the
first rank for so many ages, Raphael, Michael Angelo,
Titian, etc. They say their works are too dark, gloomy,
and heavy. With them everything must be light, false,
fantastical, and full of flutter and extravagance like
themselves.
One would like to be sure that Romney was
thinking of Boucher or of Greuze rather than
of Watteau or of Chardin.
It ought to be explained that the letter just
quoted, as well as the epistle to Carter at Rome,
ROMNEY 145
have probably been touched up by an editor.
In Messrs. Humphrey Ward's and W. Roberts'
catalogue raisonne of Romney's works there is a
transcript, verbatim et literatim, of another letter
which more correctly represents his attainments
as a scholar. Addressing his father from Rome
on June 20, 1773, Romney wrote :
Take care of Molly and John and 'keep him at
a good lattin school and desire him to endeavour to
retain the butys and knowledge the lattin authors are
filled with as well as the language.
"Molly" was the patient Mary. John, of
course, was her boy, afterwards the Rev. John
Romney and the painter's second biographer.
Neither mother nor son appears to have felt
bitter at the husband and father for taking him-
self off to the Pope's Rome, although six years
had passed since he had shown them his face.
Indeed, the Reverend John was a little indig-
nant at the suggestion that George Romney had
behaved very much amiss. Dealing in the
biography with the theory that Romney broke
up his home with an inward resolve never to
reconstitute it, the Reverend John says : " As
a proof that he entertained no such intention, he
i46 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
came twice afterwards to see his wife." Twice in
eight-and-thirty years !
Society has a short memory ; and when
Romney re-entered London after two years and
three months of travel he found the town had
forgotten him. He had spent all the money he
had, as well as fifty pounds which he hadn't.
To this debt of ^50 was added another ^50
owing by one of his brothers. Bold tactics
were necessary, and he did not shrink from
using them. A large house in Cavendish Square
stood vacant. The rent was a hundred guineas
a year. Romney took possession of it on
Christmas Day, 1775; and, although he was
practically penniless, he magnified himself still
more largely in the eyes of the public by re-
fusing sitters until he had built an addition to
the house in the shape of a studio. His policy
succeeded.
Cumberland generously sought to help the
good work with two bad " Odes to Romney,"
of which Doctor Johnson was gracious enough
to say that " they would have been thought as
good as Odes commonly are if Cumberland had
not put his name to them." A few months later
ROMNEY 147
the " poet " Hayley took Romney up. Other
patrons followed, and his future was made.
According to the diaries which Messrs. Ward .
and Roberts have so carefully printed, Romney
booked no less than 9000 sittings in the twenty
years which followed. Had he not been one of
the most tremendous workers ever known, either
in Art or out of it, he would surely have felt like
Opie, who spoke of planting a cannon at his
front door to keep sitters away.
No artist can win immortality without de-
serving it. But to become the vogue in his own
day a painter owes as much to luck as to merit.
Luck visited Romney through Thurlow, the
Lord Chancellor. When sitting to Reynolds,
Thurlow had discoursed upon the story of
Orpheus and Eurydice as a fine subject for
pictures, and had been much chagrined at
Reynolds' inattention. Romney was much more
appreciative ; and it was this, rather than any
purely artistic preference on Thurlow's part,
which prompted his public utterance : " The
town is divided between Reynolds and Romney ;
I belong to the Romney faction." Unhappily
Reynolds for once lost his self-command and
148 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
began to allude to his rival as " the man in
Cavendish Square." Romney could not wholly
forget that Reynolds had had a voice in the
halving of his fifty guineas for The Death of
Wolfe ; and all these wretched matters combined
to keep the two men apart. Romney persisted
in ignoring the Royal Academy to the end.
It was soon after Thurlow had coined his
deplorable phrase that Romney encountered the
amazing woman whose name is for ever bound up
with his own. Emma Lyon, afterwards Lady
Hamilton, lives for us in the work of Romney ;
and, for most people, Romney exists merely as
the portrayer of Lady Hamilton. Emma, or
Amy, Lyon was born at Great Neston, on the
Cheshire side of the Dee's estuary, in 1763 or
1765, which means that she was a babe unborn
when Romney first set out for London. She was
of even humbler birth than Romney himself; and
when her father, a blacksmith, died, her mother
crossed the sands o' Dee to her native Welsh
village of Hawarden. At fourteen Emma was
in service as a nursemaid ; at sixteen she was
in London as a Udy's-maid ; and before her
eighteenth year was completed, a man's base
ROMNEY 149
selfishness launched her on her extraordinary
career. With her character gone, she was glad
to find employment with the quack Graham,
whose monstrous Temple of Health was in-
stalled at Schomberg House, Pall Mall, the
mansion partly occupied by Gainsborough.
Graham was the man who held receptions, seated
up to his shoulders in a mud-bath. In an
adjoining bath sat a handsome lady ; and, as
the powdered coiffures of the pair were very
elaborate, they suggested to a wit two cauli-
flowers growing in mud. The Temple of Health
contained " the Celestial Bed," which one paid
half a guinea to see. But its chief attraction was
" the rosy Goddess of Health," a classically
robed beauty whose charms proved " the all-
blessing effects of virtue, temperance, regularity,
simplicity, and moderation." The Goddess was
Emma Lyon. She may or may not have been
Gainsborough's Musidora; but it appears certain
that Romney was among the artists who came to
draw her lovely person.
Romney was no saint ; but unhappily for
Emma, the votaries who streamed to her Temple
included rakes compared with whom the wife-
i5o GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
deserting Romney was an angel of light. One
of these, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, cajoled
her away from the quack, but soon tired of
his plaything, and left her most cruelly in the
lurch. From Hawarden, where she arrived
without a guinea, she wrote to Charles Greville,
who had befriended her before, this desperate
letter:
I am almost distracted. I have never heard from
Sir H. What shall I dow ? Good God ! What shall
I dow ? I have wrote seven letters and no answer.
I can't come to town caus I am out of money. I
have not a farthing to bless myself with, and I think
my friends looks cooly on me. O Grevell, what shall
I dow ? What shall I dow ?
It will be seen that poor Emma was not
complete as a speller ; but in this respect she
was kept in countenance by Romney and Nelson,
the two great men whose fate was bound up
with her own. On receiving her appeal, Greville
sent her money and told her to come to London.
While she was living quietly under his protec-
tion, with only twenty pounds a year for pin-
money, the chief of her few delights and
distractions was to be painted by Romney.
ROMNEY 151
And the painter was as keen as the sitter. He
painted her in a hundred attitudes and char-
acters. Jrle painted her as a Bacchante, as Circe,
as Cassandra, as Euphrosyne, as Diana, as
Iphigenia, as Ariadne, as Calypso, as a Pythian
Priestess, as Nature, as Sensibility, as Lady
Macbeth. He seated her beside a whirring
wheel and painted her as a Spinstress. He
posed her against a church organ and painted
her as St. Cecilia a holy virgin whom Emma
cannot be said to have closely resembled. In
unconscious prophecy, he painted her as Joan
of Arc ; for did not Nelson say years after-
wards that the Battle of the Nile was Emma's
doing ? In addition to her grace and beauty,
she was gifted with a supreme instinct as a
plastic actress and a model. All agree that this
divine lady, as Romney called her, " had exquisite
taste, and such expressive power as could furnish
to an historical painter an inspiring model for
his various characters, either delicate or sublime.
. . . Romney delighted in observing the wonder-
ful command she possessed over her eloquent
features, and through the surprising vicissitudes
of her destiny she ever took a generous pride
i52 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
in serving him as a model ; her peculiar force
and variations of feeling, countenance, and
gesture, inspirited and ennobled the productions
of his art."
Certain writers, who view the lives of artists
from a literary standpoint, and for whom the
mere phrase " an artists* model " always arouses
literary associations, have wished to suggest that
Romney and Emma were much more to one
another than artistic colleagues and good friends.
But the evidence establishes no such opinion.
In this matter both parties seem to have been
loyal to their friends. That they delighted in
one another's society was natural. Not only
did their affinity for one another as painter and
model become clearer at every new sitting, but
there were many little things to cement their
friendship. Both the middle-aged man and the
rosy girl had only swum to such comfort and
peace as they enjoyed through a sea of troubles.
Each of them was in a delicate conjugal position.
Both alike had been bred and born and educated
far below the social levels on which they had to
pass a great deal of their time. Together they
could unbend, sympathise, understand.
ROMNEY 153
Getting into debt and needing to repair his
fortunes by a wealthy marriage, Greville, towards
the end of 1785, struck a sordid bargain. Sir
William Hamilton, his ambassador-uncle, was
home from Naples on the look out for a second
wife. It suited the nephew better that Sir
William should not marry again ; and he thought
to thwart the plan by making over Emma to his
uncle, who was already a worshipper of her
beauty. On his side, the uncle was to pay off
the nephew's debts. Emma herself was not
consulted. Indeed, she was cheated with a lying
tale. Sir William was fifty-five four years
senior to Romney and the woman of twenty-
two was told that he would take her to Italy,
with her mother, so that she might study music
under the foremost Neapolitan masters. Greville
was to follow. On these terms, Emma agreed
to go. But as soon as she had sailed Greville
shut her out of his life. Her letters, full of
passionate pleading, he ignored. She was will-
ing, she said, to go from London to Scotland
on foot if only she might see him again. Very
soon the true position glimmered upon her
mind, and she wrote : " Remember you will
154 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
never be loved by anybody like your affectionate
and sincere Emma. Pray, for God's sake,
wright to me and come to me, for Sir William
shall not be anything to me but your friend."
When Greville at last broke silence with the
brutal and shameful truth, her righteous wrath
and pride blazed out. " If I was with you, I
would murder you and myself both " was her
splendid answer. But she was penniless and
more than a thousand miles from home. Sir
William held nearly all the cards ; and he won.
Romney, deprived of the lively and sunny
presence which had brightened so many of his
dull days, gave himself tremendously to work.
His pupil Robinson, of Windermere, thus
records the painter's mode of life :
He generally rose between seven and eight o'clock
and walked to Gray's Inn to breakfast ; on his return,
while his servant was dressing his hair, he was
employed in drawing, with which he amused himself
till ten o'clock, the hour at which he had always a
sitter appointed. His number of sitters was three,
four, and sometimes five. At noon he took broth or
coffee, and dined at four in the most simple manner.
After dinner he walked into the country, and always
had his sketch-book, in which new thoughts were
ROMNEY 155
slightly marked. On his return home he had again
recourse to his portfolio, and amused himself with the
design he had worked on in the morning till twelve
o'clock, when he retired to rest. This was his custom
without any variation, except when it rained, while
I remained with him.
Should a sitter fail to appear at the time ap-
pointed, Romney would spend the time thus
gained in further drawing.
By toiling early and late Romney's income
mounted up to three or four thousand a year.
But still he failed to make a home for his family
in London. His state of mind can be under-
stood, although it cannot be approved. By this
time his humbly bred wife was a woman of
fifty, and it was too late for her to be shorn
of provincialism and trimmed to the fashion of
the town. That Romney had become a fasti-
dious judge of elegance and beauty is plain
from such pictures as his portraits of the Ramus
Sisters two of the most entrancing portraits
in the world. The divine Emma's flower-like
beauty and flame-like spirit filled the nearer
spaces in his memory. Worst of all, he had
concealed from many friends the fact that he was
i36 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
a married man, and he lacked the moral courage
to unsay his falsehoods.
Romney's failure to pay an annual visit to the
North becomes doubly ugly when it is remem-
bered that for twenty-three years in succession
he spent his autumn at Eartham, Hayley's place
in Sussex. Yet even here his champions can
make a partial apology. The autumns at
Eartham were not delicious days of dreary
idleness. They were as crowded with work as
the winters and springs among London bricks
and mortar. Released from the drudgery of
portrait-painting, Romney would plunge with
feverish energy into historical and imaginative
composition. The scribbling and book-skim-
ming Hayley was for ever finding " subjects."
To quote one example out of a thousand,
Romney was induced to illustrate Woltemad and
his good horse rescuing a shipful of drowning
sailors. 1 Nor was Hayley the only prompter.
Anna Seward, the " Swan of Lichfield," was
preening her feathers at Eartham and was
1 An engraving of this design will be found in Hayley's "Life of
Romney." It is curious that several twentieth-century writers say that
the engraver was Caroline Watson. It was by no less an artist than
William Blake, who has made it as much a Blake as a Romney.
ROMNEY 157
belying her name by breaking out into song
early and often. Upon the Hayley hearth the
host was called Pindar, Miss Seward Sappho,
and Romney Raphael. Here is Allan Cunning-
ham's account of an Eartham day :
When the party assembled at breakfast the ordinary
greetings were Sappho, Pindar, and Raphael ; they
asked for brgad and butter in quotations, and "still
their speech was song." They then separated for
some hours. Poetasters, male and female, retired big
with undelivered verses, and Romney proceeded to
sketch from the lines of Hayley. When the hour
appointed for taking the air came, the painter went
softly to the door of the poetess, opened it gently,
and, if he found her "with looks all staring from
Parnassian dreams," he shut it and retreated. If, on
the contrary, she was unemployed, he said " Come,
Muse," and she answered " Coming, Raphael " !
To use the serviceable slang of the moment,
this is the sort of thing to make one feel tired.
Romney was tired, very tired, in 1791. With
infinite pains he had completed his pretentious
Tempest, so good in parts, so bad as a whole. But
life seemed stale. A run to Paris, by way of
Brighton and Dieppe, beguiled but did not restore
him. His fine new painting-room in the riding-
158 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
school at Eartham was ready; but he lacked the
impulse to set about those grand historical works
of which he had been dreaming. In the early
spring he was equal to the production of his
two well-known designs The Infant Shakespeare ;
but such deep dejection and acute hypochon-
dria followed that he seriously spoke of aban-
doning a profession for which he was no
longer fitted. Suddenly the clouds were rent
asunder. One June day Emma, in Turkish
dress, came into his studio and threw herself
into his arms. Her great news was that Sir
William, who was at her side as she spoke,
had brought her to England to make her Lady
Hamilton.
Three months were to pass before the wedding-
day; and his old model promised her leisure to
Romney. Straightway he was himself again. He
wrote off to Hayley : " At present, and the greatest
part of the summer, I shall be engaged in paint-
ing pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give
her any other epithet, for I think her superior to
all womankind. . . . She asked me if you would
not write my life. I told her you had begun it ;
then she said she hoped you would have much to
ROMNEY 159
say of her in the life, as she prided herself upon
being my model." A week or two later he wrote :
" I dedicate my time to this charming lady." He
also announced that one of the pictures he had
begun was Emma as a Magdalen, a gaucberie
which nobody seems to have resented. Early in
August he was in despair at some imaginary cold-
ness on the divine lady's part; but by the end of
the month he was able to say to Hayley: "My
mind had suffered so very much that my health
was affected, and I was afraid I should not have
power to have painted any more from her;
but since she has assumed her former kindness,
my health and spirits are quite recovered." To
their old good - comradeship was added the
zest of exchanging recollections of beloved
Italy.
The marriage took place on September 6, and
shortly afterwards Romney beheld the divine lady
for the last time. In England the Queen had
refused to receive her, naturally regarding the
marriage as a little late in the day; but, in Paris,
Marie Antoinette was cordial, and, in Naples,
the Queen was almost affectionate. Before
Christmas she displayed her bad grammar
160 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
and good heart in the following letter to
Romney:
MY DEAR FRIEND, I have the pleasure to inform you
we arrived safe at Naples. I have been received with
open arms by all the Neapolitans of both sexes, and by
all the foreigners of every distinction. I have been pre-
sented to the Queen of Naples by her own desire.
She as shewn me all sorts of kind and affectionate
attentions. In short, I am the happiest woman in
the world. Sir William is fonder of me every day, and
I hope he will have no cause to repent what he has
done ; for I feel so grateful to him that I think I shall
never be able to make amends for his goodness to me.
But why do I tell you this ? you know me enough.
You was the first dear friend I opened my heart to.
You ought to know me, for you have seen and dis-
coursed with me in my poorer days. You have known
me in poverty and prosperity, and I had no occasion to
have lived for years in poverty and distress if I had not
felt something of virtue in my mind. Oh, my dear
Friend ! for a time I own through distress, virtue was
vanquished. But my sense of virtue was not overcome.
How grateful now then do I feel to my dear, dear
husband that as restored peace to my mind, that as
given me honer, rank, and what is more, innocence
and happiness. Rejoice with me, my dear Sir, my
friend, my more than father. Believe me, I am still
that Emma you knew me. If I could forget for a
moment what I was I ought to suffer. Command me
ROMNEY 161
in anything I can do for you here. Believe me, I shall
have a real pleasure. Come to Naples and I will be
your model anything to induce you to come that I
may have an opportunity to shew my gratitude to you.
Take care of your health for all our sakes. How does
the pictures go on ? Has the Prince been to you ?
Write to me. I am interested in all that concerns you.
God bless you, my dear Friend. I spoke to Lady
Sutherland about you ; she loves you dearly. . . .
We have many English at Naples, as Lady's
Malmsbury, Maiden . . . etc. They are very kind
and attentive to me. They all make it a point to be
remarkably civil to me. You will be happy at this, as
you know what prudes our Ladys are. Tell Hayley
I am always reading his Triumphs of Temper. It was
that that made me Lady H, for God knows I had for
five years enough to try my temper, and I am afraid if
it had not been for the good example Serena tought me,
my girdle would have burst and, if it had, I had been
undone, for Sir William more minds temper than
beauty. He therefore wishes Mr. Hayley would come,
that he may thank him for his sweet-tempered wife.
I swear to you I have never once been out of temper
since the 6th of last September. God bless you.
Yours,
E. HAMILTON.
/*.
Perhaps it ought to be explained that Serena
was the heroine of Hayley's " Triumphs of
Temper," a poem of which fourteen editions
1 62 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
were rapidly sold. Her magic girdle had a use-
ful habit of warning her by a squeeze whenever
she was on the point of losing her temper.
Before Emma's admirable letter could reach
him, her departure had already lowered Romney
back into his pit of dejection. He was, as
usual, at Eartham for the autumn : but he did
not take up the brush. On his return to London
he wrote : " I hope in a few days to be able
to bring my mind into the old trammels of
drudgery ; though it appears horrible to me to
take up the trifling part of my profession."
The company of Cowper, whom he met at
Hayley's the following year, refreshed his mind,
and he found relief in painting a few works
other than portraits, including Milton dictating to
his Daughters, and Titania and Newton displaying the
Prism. But he was still haunted by the fear that
his powers would soon fail ; and he resolved,
after the fashion of worn-out opera-singers, that
when he could no longer practise art he would
teach it to others. Accordingly he began sowing
seeds which brought him a harvest of trouble in
the shape of ambitious building schemes which
went awry. At Hampstead he bought a villa
ROMNEY 163
for 700, but before his bizarre ideas had been
realised, he had spent on it 3000. When
his weakening mind was not playing with archi-
tectural fantasies, he was planning grandiose
illustrations for the works of Milton, which
were to be the crown of his life's activity.
Meanwhile he reduced the number of his sitters
and began to consider the finishing off of the
half-executed canvases in his studio. A passage
in Cumberland's Memoirs will show how this
accumulation had come into existence.
A man of few wants, strict economy, and no dislike
to money, he had opportunities enough to enrich him,
even to satiety, but he was at once so eager to begin
and so slow in finishing his portraits that he was for
ever disappointed of receiving payment for them by
the casualties and revolutions in the families they were
designed for. So many of his sitters were killed off,
so many favourite ladies dismissed, so many fond wives
divorced, before he would bestow half an hour's pains
on their petticoats, that his unsaleable stock was
immense ; while with a little more regularity and
decision he would have more than doubled his fortune
and escaped an infinity of petty troubles.
These unsold pictures were most of them ruined
by being stacked for the winter of 1798-9 in a
1 64 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
wooden arcade of the foolish house at Hamp-
stead.
After thirty years of absence he visited Mrs.
Romney in 1798. But he had no intention of
installing her at Hampstead, Nothing was to
interfere with his Milton Gallery not even por-
traits.
Back in London, Romney did not drift
gradually out of portrait-painting, but abandoned
it in a decisive and public way. He sold his
house in Cavendish Square to the painter Shee
(afterwards Sir Martin Shee, P.R.A.) ; and, as
if to suggest that he had sold not only the house
but also the portrait business as a going concern,
he himself was Shee's first sitter. The big
painting-room at Hampstead was ready, and the
grand blank canvases invited his onslaught.
But Romney's working-day was over. The
stroke of paralysis which ended it was called a
light one, but it was heavy enough to sound his
knell as an artist. He sought Eartham ; but
Hayley, like himself, had lacked restraint in his
hobby of building, and Romney's heart was
saddened to see Eartham passing to strange
owners. In the early summer he once more
ROMNEY 165
went North with his son, and the South saw him
no more.
Mrs. Romney could not have tended the
broken man more devotedly if he had been the
faithful partner of her hearth all the three-and-
forty years of their married life. It is a relief
to find that Romney did not worsen the errancy
of his prime by ingratitude in his old age. He
wrote fervently to Hayley of his wife's bottom-
less charity and goodness. This is the more
worth noting because Hayley has often been
accused of helping to keep Romney and his wife
apart. As the " poet " had failed to live long
with either of his own wives, it is certainly
probable that he did not encourage the truant to
encumber himself with a rustic spouse for whom
there was no room in Pindar's and " Muse's "
precious set ; but, as Romney had not seen his
wife for nine years on the day he and Hayley
first met, the " poet " must not be saddled with
too much blame.
Although she was not a tame-spirited woman,
Mrs. Romney herself never complained. Answer-
ing her son's demand for explanations, she
merely said that she had always acted for the
166 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
best. Perhaps there was something in the
case known to husband and wife alone. But,
from whatever point one views the affair, surely
one must regret Tennyson's poor stuff called
" Romney's Remorse.'* Tennyson makes Rom-
ney contemplate the Last Judgment, and say :
. . . if He should ask
" Why left you wife and children ? for My sake,
According to My word ? " And I replied
"Nay, Lord, for Art," why that would sound so
mean
That all the dead that wait the doom of Hell
For bolder sins than mine, adulteries,
W ife murders nay the ruthless Mussulman
Who flings his bow-strung Harem in the sea,
Would turn and glare at me, and point and jeer,
And gibber at the worm, who, living, made
The wife of wives a widow bride, and lost
Salvation for a sketch.
To dismiss Romney's achievement as "a
sketch " will hardly do. One might as well call
In Memoriam a couplet, or Niagara a leaking
pipe, or St. Paul's Cathedral a half-brick. The
comfortably born, warmly housed Tennyson
based his exceedingly blank verse upon the
ROMNEY 167
following sentences from a letter of Edward
Fitzgerald's :
I read Hayley's " Life of Romney " the other day.
Romney wanted but education and reading to make
him a very fine painter ; but his ideal was not high
nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life ! He
married at nineteen, and because Sir Joshua and others
had said that " marriage spoilt an artist " almost
immediately left his wife in the North, and scarce saw
her again till the end of his life ; when old, nearly mad,
and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received
him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of
hers is worth all Romney's pictures ! even as a matter
of Art, I am sure.
It is hard to see why Tennyson could not
leave this straightforward, adequate bit of prose
alone. Some itch for versifying must have been
strong upon him, with results so feeble that, if
this were a fair sample of his work, we should
have to class the " poet " Tennyson with the
" poet" Hayley. It is a pity ; for Romney and
Tennyson are so alike as artists that it is un-
pleasant to find one sitting in harsh judgment on
the other. Each of them had a defect of virility
and an excess of prettiness. Neither of them
will endure in the scantily manned ranks of the
1 68 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
greater immortals ; and yet we hesitate to put them
in the overcrowded second line. Alike in these
respects, one would wish them to be alike in
charity. Romney, who more than once rebuked
detractors of his rival Sir Joshua, would have
been less censorious to his better trained but not
more gifted brother Tennyson.
Lady Hamilton returned from Naples in 1800.
But she and Romney never met again. "The
pleasure I should receive from a sight of the
amiable Lady Hamilton would be as salutary as
great," he wrote ; " yet I fear, except I should
enjoy better health and better spirits at a better
time of year, I shall never be able to see London
again. I feel every day greater need of care and
attention, and here I experience them in the
highest degree."
Romney died on November 15, 1802. Al-
most immediately his fame began to enter the
phase of eclipse from which it did not emerge
until the nineteenth century was growing old.
At the sale of the "studio remainders" in 1807,
the Mrs. Robinson (Perdita) which now hangs by
the side of Gainsborough's still greater portrait
at Hertford House went for 16. The beautiful
ROMNEY 169
Mrs. Crouch brought 5 155. 6d., and the "poet"
Tickell was ignominiously knocked down for
seven shillings. Ninety years later a Romney
was sold for ten thousand guineas.
Turning from the less important point of
market-price to the essential point of Romney's
artistic merit, one feels that he was a great
painter within a small field. Outside portraiture
he was of little account. But if it be true that
the proper study of mankind is man, portraiture
is a high business. Romney had not the intel-
lect of Reynolds ; but, for that very reason, he
surpassed Sir Joshua in the swift seizure and sure
presentment of beauty for its own sake. In the
amiable task of depicting girlhood at the wonder-
ful time of its passage into womanhood he has
never been excelled ; and, in this matter, the
works of the too popular Greuze are album-
verses beside the poems of Romney. For the
general public his pictures have an advantage
over Sir Joshua's inasmuch as the simple and
graceful dressing of Romney's women makes them
look less artificial and old-fashioned than his
rival's. From the standpoint of the pure and
simple painter, he is not to be named in the same
iyo GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
breath as Gainsborough ; yet, as a mere placer of
pigments, he is not to be despised. Above all, he
saved Emma from the fate of Helen and of Cleo-
patra. The legends of Helen's and Cleopatra's
charms are no more than pale and scentless petals,
lying thin and dry between the pages of dusty
folios ; but Romney's divine lady still breathes
out her sweetness, like a red rose of yester-eve.
GEORGE MORLAND
(1763-1804)
HTO the right and left of the door which
admits one to the Hogarth or " Old
British " Room in the National Gallery, hang
two unmasterly pictures of laundry-maids at
work. They were painted by Henry Robert
Morland, mezzotint -engraver, portrait -maker
both in pastels and in oils, picture-restorer,
crayon - manufacturer, and dealer in artists*
materials. For some time this industrious per-
son lived at No. 47 Leicester Square, the still-
standing house occupied later on by Sir Joshua
Reynolds. On June 26, 1763, three years after
Sir Joshua's removal to the old home, Henry
Robert Morland's family was increased by a
boy, who received the name of George.
Standing before the pictures of the laundry-
maids, one suspects that they came from a con-
scientious hand and a cold heart. The suspicion
171
172 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
is well founded. Henry Morland was unsympa-
thetic and stern. As for his French wife, she
was described at first hand by James Ward as
" a little strutting bantam who ruled the roost."
Unhappily for everybody's peace and quietness,
the little George did not take after either of his
parents. He resembled rather his ancestor, Sir
Samuel Morland, a four-times-married and once-
excommunicated inventor and hydrostatician, who
had lived gaily and extravagantly under the
Merry Monarch on the site which afterwards
became Vauxhall Gardens.
To ensure the small George's progress in
virtue he was allowed neither to go to school
nor to make playmates of other children. Toys
and amusements were not allowed. Being thus
compelled to work his baby brain, he developed
his innate gift with a speed which puts all other
precocious artists hopelessly in his rear. At
three he was drawing animals with his finger on
the dusty surfaces of furniture. At four, ap-
pearing to have designs on siindry blank can-
vases, he was literally kicked out of his father's
studio, in the presence of no meaner a witness
than Benjamin West. At seven he was painting
GEORGE MORLAND 173
such huge convincing spiders on the ceilings that
the housemaids were frightened nearly out o
their lives. He would also pay off an old score
or two against his father by drawing life-like
beetles on the floor upon which the stern parent
would stamp with results unhelpful to his dignity.
More naughty still, he would imitate dropped
crayons so closely that his father would stoop to
pick them up.
Under his parents* own tuition, George re-
ceived an education which Romney, who knew
him in the seventeen-eighties, must have en-
vied. He was taught French and Latin ; and,
like Gainsborough and Romney, he became a
fair performer on the violin. He could play
the oboe ; could sing, having a serviceable bass
voice ; and could accompany himself on the
piano. As Henry Morland kept his son close
to his lessons in drawing and painting, George
soon acquired such a habit of industry that the
oft-disputed story of his having painted four
thousand pictures in the course of his life is not
incredible. At the age of ten he was exhibiting
pastel-tinted drawings at the Royal Academy.
With George's fourteenth birthday came the
174 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
problem of his apprenticeship. But his parents,
who had dreaded so much the noxious principles
of the desperately wicked little boys whom
George would have met at school, were doubly
horrified at the perils which beset a 'prentice.
Accordingly George was articled to his own
father for seven years ; and, although Romney
made a handsome bid of 300 per annum, the
apprentice worked out his term. Henry Mor-
land was a hard but competent master, and under
him George learned his business well. He clay-
moulded many casts, including Gainsborough's
Hatton Garden horse, learned perspective, drew
from the antique, studied anatomy, and copied
prints. When the daylight failed, he went on draw-
ing by the aid of a lamp. He copied Sir Joshua's
Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy and many
other paintings of the hour. Before he was
nineteen, he had seen his painting A Hovel with
Asses hung at the Royal Academy ; had painted
a series of paintings illustrating " The Faerie
Queene " ; had made designs for a number of
popular ballads ; and had drawn some political
caricatures.
Despite his public importance, George was
GEORGE MORLAND 175
still fast tied to his mother's apron-strings.
With Philip Dawe, another of Henry Morland's
articled pupils, he was allowed to spend Sundays
in long tramps among those rural sights which
furnished him with the fondest souvenirs of his
austere youth and the kindliest materials of his
reckless maturity. But Dawe was the sole friend
with whom he was suffered to spend an evening,
as his parents " could rely on his not leaving
their son till he had seen him safe home." As
for pocket-money, he earned a little by his pencil
on the sly ; but his wants were so modest that
" a pennyworth of gingerbread would suffice him
a whole day through a walk of twenty miles,
during which few things escaped his observation
and nothing that he observed was forgotten."
But boys will not be boys for ever. The
evenings with Dawe began to be spent at a
smoking club, called " The Congress," which
was held at " The Cheshire Cheese." Morland's
liveliness and his musical powers made him a
favourite with the Congressmen, while Morland
himself soon decided that his parents had vastly
exaggerated the evils of merry company. One
night a mad desire to break bounds refused to
i?6 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
be repressed. He dropped down the Thames
in the Gravesend hoy, and for two whole days
no one knew what had become of him. From
Gravesend he tramped in the dead of night with
a sailor and a carpenter as far as Chatham, where
at break of day he warmed himself up with
" purl " and gin. " Purl," which became too
frequent a drink with George as the years went
by, was a mixture of milk and ale, toned up
with wormwood. From Chatham he sailed to
the North Foreland and back, and narrowly
escaped shipwreck. Less than forty-eight hours
after leaving its doors, he was once more at
" The Cheshire Cheese," holding forth gloriously
in nautical terms, and every inch a sailor.
Having thus tasted life, George could not
long brook the injudicious restraints of home.
But it must be very carefully noted that, in
leaving his parents, he was eager for liberty as
an artist and not only for licence as a man. Nor
did he show indecent, unfilial haste. Not until
six months after his articles had expired did he
leave the old roof-tree. Indeed, one tradition
declares that he never left it at all of his own
motion, but that his father gave him a guinea
GEORGE MORLAND 177
and turned him out. This tradition, however,
is untrustworthy.
Young Morland's first experience of indepen-
dence was discouraging. He practically sold
himself to a Drury Lane publisher, who sweated
him outrageously. The sweater hired his dupe
a lodging in Martlett's Court, Bow Street.
Dawe says :
Here Morland was doomed to drudge at his
employer's price, which was contrived to be but just
sufficient to procure him subsistence, lest he should
gradually acquire the means of being independent of
him. He would not allow him to work for any other
person, and, the better to prevent it, was almost con-
tinually at his elbow. His meals were carried up to
him by his employer's boy, and when his dinner was
brought, which generally consisted of sixpennyworth
of meat from the cook-shop, with a pint of beer, he
would sometimes venture to ask if he might not have
a pennyworth of pudding.
Before long the employer, who boasted some
depraved clients, had the effrontery to demand
that his victim should make certain designs of an
unworthy nature. To Morland's honour let it
be recorded that he disobeyed ; and, to the end
of his life, however degraded he might be in his
ii
178 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
habits and surroundings, he maintained in his
work a standard of delicacy equal to Gains-
borough's own.
Lacking courage to beard the tyrant, Morland
ran away, first locking his room and pocketing
the key so that his employer would be responsible
for more rent. A wealthy Mrs. Hill, who
admired his work, had invited him to her house
at Margate ; so he hired a horse and set out.
The beast being a good one and after the rider's
own heart, Morland neglected to return it for
six or seven weeks. That he was in good spirits
is evident from the following letter to Philip
Dawe :
SHIP INN, DOVER,
Friday.
DAWE, I arrived at Margate on Wednesday,
surveyed the town on Thursday, and drank -tea at
Dover on Friday. Here is one of the pleasantest spots
in the world ; a fine view of the clift and castle, with
the pier and shipping ; opposite are the Calais clifts,
which seem so very near as to appear not above three
or four miles over. A very large and pretty town is
Dover, and looks something like London ; but of all
the horrible places that can be imagined Sandwich is
the worst. J Tis very likely I shall go over to France
with Mrs. Hill ; she is talking about it. My com-
GEORGE MORLAND 179
pliments to the Congress, except that Jew-looking
fellow. I have swam my horse in the sea several
times. I shall be glad of an answer.
I am, yours etc.,
MORLAND.
Under Mrs. Hill's auspices the young man
was in serious danger of becoming a portrait-
painter. Perceiving his peril, he left her house
after two months and hired a lodging whence he
might sally out at any time among the soldiers
and postboys and old salts who were to furnish
the contents of his best pictures. But he re-
mained on the best of terms with Mrs. Hill,
with whose maid, Jenny, he was secretly in love.
She was seventeen years old, over six feet high,
and altogether " one of the sweetest creatures
ever seen by man." Morland's taste in human
beings was not exclusive. His fellow-lodger and
bosom friend, Mr. Sherborne, was brother to
Lord Digby ; but Morland thought that " some
nobleman's brother " was a sufficient description
of him. Meanwhile he was both painting and
drinking hard. Jenny, after she had returned
to London, wrote to him by every post, and at
last Morland told Dawe that the marriage was to
i8o GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
take place in three weeks. But he was not a
grand lover, and was soon worried by doubts.
He wrote to Dawe :
If I marry her I am undone, by reason Mrs. Hill
must find it out it cannot be avoided ; her acquaint-
ances in London would inform her of it in France,
she would then throw me aside. Besides, many
gentlemen would give my acquaintance up if I perform
my promise with her, and which as I certainly like
her better than any other^ I am determined to perform
after my arrival in London, if that should ever happen.
Mrs. Hill, not Jenny, was the conquering
heroine. At the end of October, 1785, she
and Morland sailed for Calais. But Venus did
not call upon Aeolus to punish his apostasy.
A favourable wind blew the runaway to France
almost as quickly as a turbine-steamer would
carry him to-day. From pier to pier his time
was ninety-two minutes. Like Hogarth he was
peevish at first with France and things French ;
but at St. Omer, the good town where so much
has been done for England, he was happier.
Even to-day, with one of its greatest churches
in ruins and many other ecclesiastical buildings
secularised, St. Omer is a pleasant spot. Mor-
GEORGE MORLAND 181
land loved it, because there were fourpenny
coach fares and no risks of running against
Jenny. He almost decided to settle for life in
France, where, he said, one could live very well
on thirty pounds a year. But he was back in
Margate for the winter, and in London, at his
parents' house, for the spring.
Jenny's affair had to be settled ; but Morland
was never a great man at facing discordant
music. Rather shabbily convincing himself and
his friends that neither his health nor his fortune
would allow him to marry, he despatched an
ambassador-plenipotentiary to Jenny, who was
to obtain Morland's release if possible. Failing
this, Jenny was to name the day. The am-
bassador's account of Morland's position was so
alarming that Jenny's brother put his foot down
and forbade the marriage.
Thus meanly off with the old, Morland made
haste to be on with the new. The second fair
one was a maidservant, the daughter of a tailor.
Once more a friend was called in to help. This
time the friend's duty was simply to accompany
Morland to the tailor's house, thus giving some
moral support to the pleading suitor. But, on
182 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
the way, the friend repented and went home.
Morland, left alone, got as far as the tailor's
house ; but there his courage failed him, and
he abandoned the damsel rather than face the
father.
It is the third time that brings luck. Mor-
land, soon afterwards, became acquainted with
the engraver, William Ward, brother of James
Ward, the excellent animal painter. Morland
was only three years William Ward's senior ;
and the two young men had so many tastes
in common, especially music, that Morland went
to lodge with the Wards at Kensal Green.
Here he found a good atmosphere. The Wards
were quite as respectable as George's rigid and
uncomfortable parents ; yet their homely musical
evenings were as enjoyable as the rowdy nights
at "The Cheshire Cheese," and much more so
than that dull orgy at Margate, where, on
George's own confession, almost everybody in
the town got drunk to celebrate a joint fox-
hunt and Freemasons' gathering. No wonder
that Morland, after meeting the Wards, painted
works with such titles as Domestic Happiness and
The Happy Family.
GEORGE MORLAND 183
Anne Ward, William's sister, was " a young
lady of beauty and modesty." She and her
family did not repel the suit which Morland
soon pressed upon them ; and, in July, 1786,
the two were married at Hammersmith Church.
The bridegroom showed a regrettable mind by
insisting on wearing two pistols stuck in his
belt ; but to quote a contemporary, " the general
opinion was that a prettier couple had never
graced the interior of that sacred edifice in the
memory of the oldest spectator present."
One good turn deserves another. William
Ward having brought Morland a bride, Mor-
land made his own sister Maria known to
William ; and, within a month of the first
wedding, there was a second. The two couples
set up a joint home in High Street, Maryle-
bone. But there was one pair too many in this
little Garden of Eden ; and, before three months
had passed, the two bridegrooms are said to
have begun potting at each other with slug-
loaded horse-pistols in an old saw-pit. The
Morlands left the Wards in possession and
removed to Camden Town, which was still a
rural spot.
i8 4 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Allan Cunningham's statement that " Morland
married without being in love " is true in the
sense that Morland was incapable of a grand
romantic passion for anybody. But when " the
Scottish Vasari " goes on to suggest that Mor-
land ill-treated his wife, the suggestion needs
defining. Mrs. Morland suffered, and he him-
self suffered far more, from her husband's im-
providence ; and, although she had no children,
it must have been painful and humiliating to
be perpetually beating strategic retreats from
bailiffs. But it is untrue that Morland ever
deserted his wife. Dawe, who knew them both,
says that they were " sincerely attached to each
other, insomuch that the one was extremely
alarmed and affected whenever the other hap-
pened to be indisposed."
Morland worked hard ; but money came in
slowly. In the marriage-year, his Flowery
Banks of the Shannon was shown at the Royal
Academy, and he was beginning to be widely
known through engravings of his works. Yet
his Mad Bull, a composition with twenty figures
in it, was sold for half a guinea. His Laetitia
series six pictures forming a " Progress " much
W *
o ^
K -5
GEORGE MORLAND 185
gentler in tone than Hogarth's brought him
only a few pounds, although it was destined to
be sold for ^5880 in 1904 at Christie's. By
degrees matters mended a little, and the young
people moved once more into a larger house.
Morland's activity was prodigious. In 1788
eleven engravers were busy upon thirty-two
finished and important pictures from his brush.
These included Children Playing at Soldiers, and
many more of those engaging scenes of child-
hood in which he has never been excelled ; The
Visit to the Boarding-School, now at Hertford
House ; The Slave Trade, which redounds to
Morland's lasting honour as a plea for the slave,
painted at a time when abolition was still un-
popular ; the famous Dancing T)ogs ; and that
popular pair of moral pictures The Fruits of Early
Industry and Economy and The Effects of Extrava-
gance and Idleness.
Marriage did not make a man of Morland to
the extent of curing his cowardice or slackness
when unpleasant or tiresome business had to be
faced. In consequence, he lost most of the fruit
of his labours. A, certain Irwin began to act as
his agent in selling pictures, the transaction
1 86 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
being complicated by occasional advances from
Irwin's wealthier brother. Irwin sold at least
fifty works for fifteen guineas apiece, but
he paid only seven guineas apiece to Mor-
land. There are reasons for believing that
one of these seven - guinea works was the
wonderful Dancing Dogs, which was sold at
the Tweedmouth sale in 1905 for four thousand
guineas.
Morland was a swift and sure worker ; but he
did not produce his masterpieces without infinite
pains. He maintained that child-models must
be taken unawares, and therefore he would have
children, to whom he was always kind, playing
about in his studio for hours. He became a
constable, so as to collect materials for his more
serious works, and his four pictures called The
Deserter were studied from a sergeant, soldier,
and drummer whom he entertained for a night
and a whole Sunday, sketching and putting
questions nearly all the time. While he was at
work on stable subjects, such as the grand Inside
of a Stable in the National Gallery, he would
scatter straw about his house, so as to study its
forms and the play of interior light upon it.
l"l
I
w
H
O -5
w Q
o ^
GEORGE MORLAND 187
Indeed, so laboriously did he strive at The
Straw-yard, which is a companion picture to
The Inside of a Stable, that he painted on it, " No
more straw-yards for me, G. Morland." Seeing
an old white nag on its way to slaughter, he
bought it, kept it a fortnight in his painting-
room, and introduced it into many pictures.
His visits to waterside taverns and poor ale-
houses were prompted by a desire to study
humble models rather than by low instincts.
Hassall, one of his biographers, first saw Mor-
land " posting before him with a pig which he
held in his arms as if it had been a child."
As models of the smaller birds and beasts, he kept
a menagerie of monkeys, hogs, squirrels, foxes,
goats, cats, dogs, guinea-pigs, rabbits, mice,
ducks, pigeons, barn-yard fowls, and ever so
many other four-footed and two-footed creatures.
His unbroken industry and growing popularity
soon brought Morland, in spite of his bad habits
as a business man, an income running into four
figures. But he spent more than he received.
Ten years before, a penn'orth of gingerbread
had made him happy for a whole day : but by
1789 he owed 200 beyond what he could
i88 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
hope to pay. In mortal fear of a debtors 1
prison, he visited the King's Bench gaol so
as to see if gaols were as bad as Hogarth
had painted them. Returning home in horror
he fell to, and, by 1791, had paid off all his
debts.
Paddington in 1791 was still a pleasant seat
of dairy-farming. Thither Morland repaired.
His cottage was opposite a picturesque Tudor
inn, " The White Lion," where he could find
such horses, dogs, postboys and other men and
beasts as he required. The Inside of a Stable was
studied at " The White Lion." But the mob of
spongers on his conviviality would not leave him
to work in peace. Before long he was keeping
eight or ten horses at livery, chiefly for the
pleasure of his so-called friends : he was rent-
ing a large salle d'armes ; and was feasting stray
acquaintances at "The White Lion." Twelve
months of this life convinced him that he might
as well go back to open extravagance ; so he left
his cottage for a house, and engaged a footman
and two grooms, and threw prudence to the
winds. He still worked hard and earned a
great deal. For example, he painted Watering
w **
si
o ^
u
O
GEORGE MORLAND 189
the Farmer s Horse and Rubbing Down the Post-
horse in one day ; and he often earned a hundred
guineas a week. Yet, before another year had
passed, he owed ^3,700.
Suddenly sobered by a second gaol-nightmare
he tried to settle down in Charlotte Street,
Fitzroy Square. At first he was under bond to
pay off his creditors to the extent of ^"120 a
month. Finding this impossible, the monthly
obligation was reduced to ^"100, an amount he
could have raised quite easily had he not per-
sisted in his foolish courses of giving fresh
promissory notes and selling pictures for trifling
sums on a hand-to-mouth principle. At last
some of his creditors lost patience ; and from
1793 to the end of his wild life, Morland was a
hunted man. In dread of arrest, he could only
venture abroad after nightfall, and very often
he was forced to hide himself in wretched
lodgings, sometimes in meaner London, some-
times in country towns or obscure villages.
Having no other friends in such places, he
naturally turned to the free and open society of
the taverns with disastrous results. Here is his
own record of " G. Morland's list for one day
igo GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
at Brighton, having nothing to do." It is in
a letter to his brother :
:}
Rum and Milk
Hollands Gin . ^ Before Breakfast
Coffee Breakfast
Hollands
Porter
Shrub
Ale
Before Dinner
Hollands and Water
Port Wine with Ginger .
Bottled Porter
Port Wine at Dinner and after
Port Wine
Porter
Bottled Porter
Punch
Porter
Ale
Opium and Water
Port Wine at Supper
Gin and Water
Shrub
Rum, on going to Bed
In case any reader should smile at such a
catalogue as a hoax, the writer of this book is
GEORGE MORLAND 191
sorry to say that he knows a living Bohemian
who is inferior to Morland in genius but fully
his equal in thirst. Upon the original of his
sad confession, Morland sketched his own tomb-
stone, and added the epitaph: "Here lies a
drunken dog."
Collapsing as a man, Morland nevertheless
held his own as an artist. His drunken dog-
days were the high-summer of his artistic
flowering. The more stormy, unwholesome,
and vicious his life became, the more he strove
to redress the balance by painting calm and
sweet and virtuous scenes of rustic life. The
more he debased himself in stuffy drinking-
dens, the grander became his elemental visions
of cliff and sea and sky. The worse his own
faith with his creditors, the more his brush did
homage to honourable toil. He was an ignoble
sinner propitiating Virtue with noble altar-pieces.
But this could not go on for ever. A man
divided against himself cannot stand : and the
time came when Morland's art and himself sank
in a common ruin.
The earlier years of his life as a fugitive from
writs and bailiffs were not all panic and despair.
1 92 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Mr. Wedd, his indefatigable solicitor, would
sometimes succeed in so arranging matters that
his client could enjoy truces among his friends.
And even when he was in hiding his lively dis-
position rapidly asserted itself. He would make
friends with gipsies, pedlars, tramps and water-
men, as much to their satisfaction as his own.
Practical joking often cheered Morland in his
exile. One day he saw a party of anglers,
whom he had been sketching, cast their lines
into the water and betake themselves to the
nearest inn. Pulling up the hooks, Morland
fastened to them some old shoes which he had
found on the shore, and lowered them again
into the water. The returning anglers, seeing
their floats strongly submerged, were sure they
had hooked big fish, and Morland had the joy
of seeing the catch hauled in. On another
occasion he took with him a ventriloquist to
buy a fish. " Is it quite fresh ? " he asked sus-
piciously. The fish-wife assured him it was
only just out of the water. Then the ventrilo-
quist got to work. From the fish's lips came a
solemn protest that he was, to put it mildly, not
all he ought to have been. Unhappily he made
GEORGE MORLAND 193
this announcement in language which no respect-
able fish should use to a lady under any provoca-
tion whatsoever ; and this was not the only case
in which Morland's practical joking ceased to be
funny by beginning to be vulgar.
A closely-printed page of this book would
hardly contain a complete list of Morland's
residences during the last ten years of his life.
Enderby, in Leicestershire ; Red Lion Square,
Chelsea, Lambeth, Queen Anne Street East,
Kentish Town, Frith Street, China Row, New-
ington, Leadenhall Street and Hackney, in or
near eighteenth-century London ; Cowes, Yar-
mouth and Freshwater in the Isle of Wight
these were only a few of the places where he
lived in alternate calm and storm. Fortunately
his mobility was perfect ; for, having once had
his portmanteau cut from behind in a post-
chaise he travelled thereafter " like a snail, with
all his property on his back."
Living a life necessarily attended by secrecy
and mystery, Morland had to bear extra troubles
which were not of his own direct making.
Nothing fails like failure. At Hackney his
talk, in a tavern, about " copper-plates " and
N
i94 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
" impressions " aroused a suspicion that he was
a fabricator of flash bank-notes, and he had to
fly from the constables sent by the Bank of
England to arrest him. In the Isle of Wight,
where he was taken for a spy, he and his drawings
were seized by a lieutenant and eight militiamen,
who marched him twelve miles to Newport,
under a burning sun, to clear his character.
These arrests were false alarms. But by 1799
the battle against his creditors became hopeless.
Although Morland was only thirty-six he had
already made acquaintance with apoplexy, and
his wife's health also had begun to fail. By the
advice of Mr. Wedd, he hoisted the white flag
and allowed himself to be arrested and taken
to the King's Bench prison. But, under Mr.
Wedd's clever management, the imprisonment
was only nominal. By paying certain fees the
debtor was allowed to "live within the rules."
In other words, he became a sort of ticket-of-
leave man. "The rules," or "liberties," were
three miles in circumference, and Morland,
getting as far as possible from the centre, took
a furnished house in St. George's Fields. His
wife and his brother Henry lived with him, and
GEORGE MORLAND 195
he continued to turn out large numbers of pic-
tures ; but he had passed his zenith. " The
rules " did not admit of his faring forth to
work from animate and inanimate Nature by
field and hedgerow and rocky shore ; nor did
his hard taskmasters and creditors the picture-
dealers permit him to choose his own subjects.
By paying extra fees a debtor could occasion-
ally gain a day's leave to be spent in a run
outside " the rules." This favour was granted
on condition that the prisoner should not enter a
tap-room and that he should return within " the
rules " at an hour appointed. For a time Mor-
land obeyed orders. But one day Mr. Jones,
the prison-marshal, found him in the tap-room
of a public-house. He wound up a sharp
scolding by threatening to make Morland's
imprisonment a stern reality. It happened,
however, that Morland, at this very time, was
painting a picture for the marshal. He went
home, executed the work at a single sitting,
and appeared with it before the marshal the next
morning. It was a representation of the tap-
room, with Morland himself figuring among the
drinkers, and with the marshal gratefully lean-
i 9 6 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
ing in through the window and taking from
Morland's hand a glass of gin.
Gin, with which London reeked in his days,
went on doing its deadly work on Morland's
broken constitution. In 1802 apoplexy de-
livered a second warning. Illness also attacked
Mrs. Morland, who had to be removed to purer
air on the other side of the Thames. Years
of excursions and alarums had not destroyed her
affection ; and she was often heard to say that,
if her husband should die before her, she would
follow him to the grave in three days.
The Corporation of Nottingham possesses an
unutterably sad picture, from his own hand, of
Morland painting in an attic. With drawn and
weary face he is pausing to rest while his man
cooks a mean meal over a sputtering fire. The
fatal bottle is on the floor. Probably the reality
was even sadder than this sad picture. Only by
the aid of the strongest glasses could Morland
see to work ; he would jump at the smallest
noise ; and he would often burst into tears.
Without two night-lights in the room the
second in case the first failed he dared not go
to bed. Dawe says : " If the light happened
GEORGE MORLAND 197
to be extinguished in a room where he was
sitting, he would creep towards the fire, or the
person next to him."
Morland's flame leapt up before it died.
The Insolvent Debtors Act of 1802 released
him from " the rules " ; and, at " The Black
Bull," a Highgate inn, he had the joy of watch-
ing the out- and home-bound stage coaches, of
which there were then nearly a hundred a day.
But the money-getting grind in London had
to be faced once more. His eyes grew dimmer
and his left hand became paralysed. A few new
debts accumulated upon him, and one of these
caused his death. One autumn day, as he was
taking the air supported on his servant's arm,
a creditor stopped him and demanded the re-
payment of ten pounds. In default of the
money, Morland was immediately arrested and
carried off to a sponging-house. With a huge
effort he set himself to paint a last picture which
should purchase his liberty ; but he fell to the
ground in a fit, and died from brain fever on
October 29th, 1804.
Friends, who had heard of her presentiment,
tried in vain to keep the news from Mrs.
198 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Morland ; and, within three days, she too was
dead. They were buried in one grave at St.
James's Chapel, in the Hampstead Road.
"Here lies a Drunken Dog." Thus had
Morland worded his own epitaph. The world,
always ready to believe a man's word about his
own vices, has taken care to keep his memory
black. But the Morland revealed in his pic-
tures is the principal part of the Morland who
exists for us to-day ; and over that larger
Morland a more truthful epitaph would be :
HERE
with Her who loved him unto Death
lies
GEORGE MORLAND,
Painter,
who, recoiling from the restraint of injudicious parents,
treated Some well, Others ill, and Himself
the worst of All.
BELOVED
of Dumb Beasts and of Little Children, he practised
some Virtues in his life and preached no Vices in his Art.
HE DIED POOR
in a Debtors' Prison,
leaving England rich by the productions of his Genius.
His Short Day was Stormy :
May He Rest in Peace.
GEORGE MORLAND 199
Standing before this imaginary monument, we
may take leave of the man Morland by recalling
one more story of his last years. Collins had a
clever son who was consumed with desire to see
the great artist at work. For two hours
Morland, who was so weak and ill that he had
to be supported at the easel, plied his brush
for the boy's encouragement and delight, only
ceasing when he sank down in sheer exhaustion.
They bear false witness against the dead who
say that he was always profuse but never
generous.
As for Morland the artist, his fame is secure.
Uncatholic connoisseurs may be met with here
and there who declare that they cannot be in-
terested in his painting because his strong
subject-interest gets in their eyes' way. Boys
robbing orchards, they say, may please the
general, but the elect would prefer less palpable
Boys and a less practicable Orchard. But this
is a confession of incompetence. So long as it
is not keeping downright vulgar company, a
fully endowed human being rejoices over good
painting wherever he may encounter it. A man
who requires paint to be, so to speak, isolated,
206 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
and sets up a cry of Paint for Paint's sake, is
erring as widely from the centre of truth as the
man who cares for the subject of a picture alone.
If Morland's anecdotal or didactic paintings were
like the " Don't be Frightened " or " I's Biggest "
supplements to the Christmas magazines, or if
they were as meanly conceived as the platitu-
dinous " religious " allegories of a certain living
painter whose works are so honourably hung at
Burlington House, then one could understand
an impatient turning-away from their technical
merits. But the truth is that Morland's subject-
matter is nearly always as delightful as his treat-
ment, and every year his pictures become more
precious as a record of the Old England which
is passing away. From our corrugated-iron we
can turn to his golden thatch and moss-rich
tiles ; from our steam-engines and bicycles and
motor-cars to his hay-wains and post-horses
and stage-coaches ; and from our " lower
classes," all dressed in cheap imitations of towny
fashions, to his peasantry and watermen and
attendants upon the noble horse, each one of
them living his characteristic life. And, in
Morland's case, we can be sure that we are not
GEORGE MORLAND 201
looking at pretty fancies, for it was well said of
him on the morrow of his death that he " would
never risk truth, but would rather give twenty
guineas to have a cat stolen for him than pre-
sume to paint one from an uncertain remem-
brance."
LAWRENCE
(1769-1831)
the small George Morland was
painting spiders on London ceilings and
black-beetles on London floors, a man of many
parts was keeping The White Lion Inn at
Bristol. The son of a Presbyterian pastor, he
had been, in turn, a lawyer, "a poetaster,
spouter of odes, actor, revenue-officer, and
farmer," and in none of these callings had he
prospered. Even as a publican this rolling-
stone gathered no moss ; and his tenancy of
" The White Lion " would have been ignomini-
ous had it not been distinguished by the birth
of a son who became in due time President of
the Royal Academy and Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Thomas was born on May 4, 1769, being his
parents' sixteenth and youngest child. Most of
his brothers and sisters were dead before he was
born. When the boy was about three years old
202
LAWRENCE 203
" The White Lion " had to be given up owing
to pecuniary troubles, and the family removed
to " The Black Bear " at Devizes, a hostelry
which survives to encourage the twentieth-
century motorist. As Devizes was a fashionable
halt upon the Bath road, there were seasons of
the year when it overflowed with persons of
quality.
Little Thomas's precocity was only inferior
to little Morland's. At the age of five he was
credited with a real talent in drawing, and
especially in portraiture. But his versatility
would have put Morland in the shade. Young
Lawrence, using a table as a platform, could
declaim Milton and the odes of Collins in so
professional a style that his father would intro-
duce him to " The Black Bear's " guests with
the formula : " Gentlemen, here's my son. Will
you have him recite from the poets or take your
portraits ? " His education was neglected, but
the child's eager mind found its own food. His
long fair hair, hanging on his shoulders, his
sweet voice and graceful gestures, seemed to
mark him for the stage. Indeed, Garrick, whose
powerful personality had already influenced
204 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Hogarth and Reynolds, Gainsborough and
Romney, was puzzled as to the child's destiny.
One day on his way home from Bath the great
actor demanded of " The Black Bear's " host if
" Tommy had learnt any more speeches." Over
tea in the summer-house of the inn garden
Tommy recited some more Shakespeare, and, at
the end of the performances, Garrick clapped him
on the back and cried, " Bravely done, Tommy !
Whether will ye be, a painter or a player ? Eh ? "
Posting up her diary at Bath in April, 1780,
Sir Joshua's " little Burney " wrote :
We were extremely pleased with them [Tommy's
two sisters] and made them a long visit, which I
wished to have been longer. But though these pretty
girls struck us so much, the wonder of the family
was yet to be produced. This was their brother, a
most lovely boy of ten years of age, who seems to be
not merely the wonder of their family, but of the
times for his astonishing skill in drawing. They
protest he has never had any instruction, yet showed
us some of his productions that were really beautiful.
Those that were copies were delightful those of his
own composition amazing, though far inferior. I was
also struck with the boy and his works.
But not even the attractions of his Wunderkind
enabled Tommy's father to maintain himself
LAWRENCE 205
successfully at "The Black Bear." By 1779
Devizes had become as uncomfortable as Bristol,
and another move was made, this time to Oxford.
It seems to be true that Tommy, at the age of
ten, became the principal support of his parents,
and that they remained dependent upon him
until their death in 1796. As a brace of lords,
a countess, and a bishop or two were among his
patrons, he was able to obtain enough commis-
sions to keep his precious parents going. But
Oxford could not content them for long. All
their lives their ears had been wont to tingle at
the magic name of Bath the Bath where Mr.
Gainsborough had literally turned golden guineas
away from his front-door. After a visit to
Weymouth, where, of course, the King was the
attraction, to Bath the whole family went. They
hired a house at a hundred pounds a year, and,
although something came back through the let-
ting of lodgings, Tommy was their chief bread-
winner. His modest price of a guinea for a
picture was raised to a guinea and a half, quite
in the professional way, and Bath duly went mad
over the infant-prodigy.
The boy Lawrence's earliest works were not
206 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
paintings. Most of them were in coloured
crayons, or in black and red lead. Their shape
was oval and their size generally half-life. One
of them, Mrs. Siddons as Aspasia, was engraved
at a considerable profit. Thus was Thomas
Lawrence, at twelve years of age, fairly launched
upon a remunerative career. One cannot help
thinking, in this connection, of Constable and
Corot, two incomparably greater artists, each of
whom had to wait until he was nearly forty
before selling his first picture. Yet Lawrence's
was, after all, the harder luck. By being made
to run before he had fairly learned to walk, he
was thwarted of the noble gait and port of which
his genius was capable. He came to know this
himself, and his words were true of many things
besides his finance when he wrote to a friend in
later years : " I began life badly."
With an average of four new sitters a week,
at the further enhanced fee of three guineas
each, the young pastellist became ambitious. To
complete his resemblance to his fellow portrait-
painters, he essayed a Christ bearing the Cross, a
picture eight feet long, in the grand style. This
has disappeared. That he had a good all-round
LAWRENCE 207
conceit of himself appears from his saying :
" Excepting Sir Joshua, for the painting of a
head, I would risk my reputation with any
painter in London." But his head was not
wholly turned, for he bent all his efforts towards
London and the tuition to be found there.
At the age of eighteen Thomas had his desire.
In the autumn of 1787 he was admitted as a
student of the Royal Academy. He struck a
fellow-student as "a very genteel, handsome
young man, but rather effeminate." Effeminacy
rarely goes with shyness, and therefore the very
genteel young man was not tardy in presenting
himself and his works to Sir Joshua. " You
have been looking at the old masters, I see,"
said the grand old man, " but my advice is this :
Study Nature, study Nature," Lawrence could
not, or would not, and certainly did not follow
this wise counsel, and consequently his works
have the monotony of a pretty mannerism rather
than the infinite variety of external truth. But
although the young man, consciously or uncon-
sciously, declined the old man's guidance, he
repeatedly accepted invitations to No. 47 Leices-
ter Square. There, if he learned little of Sir
208 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Joshua's art, at least he perfected himself in
courtly speech.
Had Lawrence's humility been much less than
it was, he could have pleaded as an excuse that
London was already accepting him as an artist
who had " arrived." His price for a head soon
rose to ten guineas, and if he had not allowed
his parents ^300 a year and made himself re-
sponsible for some of their debts, he would have
been a rich man. Homer reciting the Iliad to the
Greeks did him no more good than the grand
style had done to his forerunners ; but in 1790
he painted the lucky portrait of Miss Farren,
afterwards Lady Derby, which immediately won
European fame. Lawrence's adversaries fell foul
of him for what they called the inconsistency
between Miss Farren's winter furs and the
summer landscape in the background ; but the
general public, with a keener recollection of the
British climate, found nothing amiss. An ex-
ceptionally beautiful engraving of this Miss
Farren^ stippled in colours, was sold in almost
unprecedented numbers. From Miss Farren,
Lawrence went on to paint Lady Hamilton ; and
from Lady Hamilton to the Royal Family.
LADY BLESSINGTON
By
SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE
From the Painting in the Wallace Collection
LAWRENCE 209
George the Third made him his Painter-in-
ordinary, in succession to Sir Joshua Reynolds ;
and the Royal Academy created for his express
benefit the title of " Supplemental Associate."
Lawrence had barely attained his majority
when he was able to command a hundred guineas
for a full-length portrait. He boasted a private
secretary and an imposing lodging in Old Bond
Street. Expenditure usually outrunning income,
he was forced to stick to portrait-painting in the
main ; but he still hankered after imaginative
compositions. In the Diploma Gallery may be
seen his ambitious Awake, arise, or be for ever
fallen, an attempt to show Satan rallying the
rebellious angels. This work was almost as ill
received as poor Hogarth's Sigismunda. One
gentle critic complained that Lawrence's Devil
was "all arms and legs and might be taken for
a sign of the Spread Eagle." He added, very
elegantly : " It is so coloured that it conveys the
idea of a mad sugar-baker dancing naked in the
conflagration of his own treacle." Fuseli said
it was " a d d thing certainly, but not the
Devil." Still, as Lawrence himself was fairly
well satisfied, no great harm was done.
210 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Lawrence's mother died in 1796 and was
quickly followed to the grave by her husband,
who had increased his debts by holding a foolish
show of stuffed birds and other curiosities, inter-
mingled with Thomas's drawings. Up to the
time of his parents' death the painter devoted
himself to them, and he must have been nearly
twenty-eight years old before he fell seriously
in love. The hapless girl upon whom his fatal
choice descended was Sally Siddons, Mrs. Sid-
dons' eldest daughter. For more than a hundred
years the truth of this tangled romance lay
hidden, and Lawrence's biographers knew no
more than is contained in the following passage
from Fanny Kemble's "Record of a Girlhood" :
While frequenting [Mrs. Siddons'] house upon
terms of the most affectionate intimacy, he proposed
to her eldest daughter, my cousin Sarah, and was
accepted by her. Before long, however, he became
deeply dejected, moody, restless, and evidently ex-
tremely and unaccountably wretched. Violent scenes
of the most painful emotion, of which the cause was
inexplicable and incomprehensible, took place re-
peatedly between himself and Mrs. Siddons, to whom
he finally, in a paroxysm of self-abandoned misery,
confessed that he had mistaken his own feelings, and
that her younger daughter, and not the elder, was the
LAWRENCE 211
real object of his affection, and ended by imploring
permission to transfer his addresses from the one to
the other sister. How this most extraordinary change
was accomplished I know not ; but only that it took
place, and that Maria Siddons became engaged to her
sister's faithless lover. To neither of them, however,
was he destined ever to be united ; they were both
exceedingly delicate young women, with a tendency
to consumption, which was probably developed and
accelerated in its progress in no small measure by all
the bitterness and complicated difficulties of the
disastrous double courtship.
Maria, the youngest, an exceedingly beautiful girl,
died first ; and on her death-bed exacted from her
sister a promise that she would never become Law-
rence's wife ; the promise was given and she died,
and had not lain long in her untimely grave when her
sister was laid in it beside her. The death of these
two lovely and amiable women broke off all connec-
tion between Sir Thomas Lawrence and [Mrs. Sid-
dons], and from that time they never saw or had any
intercourse with each other.
The case would be bad enough even if it were
no worse than Fanny Kemble imagined. But,
in 1904, Mr. Oswald G. Knapp 1 printed verbatim
1 "An Artist's Love-Story : Told in the Letters of Sir Thomas Law-
rence, Mrs. Siddons, and her Daughters," edited by Oswald G. Knapp, M.A.
(London, 1904). Mr. Knapp's volume evoked "Sir Thomas Lawrence's
Letter-bag" (London, 1906), edited by Mr. George Somes Layard, but this
book throws hardly any fresh light on the affair.
212 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
a many-sided correspondence which pours day-
light over a tragedy so complicated that few six-
shilling novelists would have the courage to offer
its like to the reviewers. Mr. Knapp's treasure-
trove of desperate epistles, which is studded
all over with italics, capital letters, and marks
of exclamation, seems to tell us that Lawrence,
about 1796-7, did indeed fall in love with Sally
Siddons, but that he did not carry a formal suit
to completion. Mr. and Mrs. Siddons knew
nothing of the affair ; and therefore when he
cooled towards Sally and warmed towards Maria,
the trouble was restricted to himself and the
two girls. His task was difficult. But Sally
was unselfish and high-minded ; and Lawrence
had a lifelong skill in managing women, as
appears from the testimony of a lady who said :
" It cannot be too strongly stated that his manner
was likely to mislead without his intending it.
He could not write a common answer to a dinner
invitation without its assuming the tone of a
billet-doux. The very commonest conversation
was held in that soft, low whisper, and with that
tone of deference and interest which are so un-
usual and so calculated to please." Somehow
MRS. SIDDONS
By
SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE
From the Painting in the National Gallery
LAWRENCE 213
the transfer was made without any rupture be-
tween the sisters or any painful recourse to
mamma.
It is at this point that the huge gap in Fanny
Kemble's information begins. Her narrative im-
plies that Lawrence was well pleased with his
new sweetheart, and that, had she lived, they
would have married. The whole truth is far
more startling. After a brief experience of
Maria, Lawrence discovered that his passion for
Sally had been not dead but sleeping, and that
his infatuation for her younger sister was merely
an episode, an aberration. Thenceforth he put
his whole mind to undoing his mistake and re-
gaining Sally ; and it was no doubt at this stage
that he fell into the restlessness and wretched-
ness which, as Miss Kemble says, led to stormy
scenes with Mrs. Siddons.
To the end of her short life Sally appears
to have remained in love with Lawrence. But,
having a mind and a will as well as a heart and
feeling, she did not encourage a second wooing
from the jilter of Maria. For the full sequel one
must turn to Mr. Knapp's book ; but here is the
story in brief. Maria was sent to the Hot Wells,
214 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
near Bristol, where her malady of consumption
defied the baths and the physicians. Her hostess
was Mrs. Pennington, wife of the Master of
Ceremonies at the Wells, and therefore an acces-
sible lady. Here came Lawrence's opportunity.
He hurried to Clifton, put up at an inn under an
assumed name, and opened fire on Mrs. Penning-
ton with a letter which would overflow five pages
of the present volume. Among a great many
other frantic things he wrote :
My name is Lawrence, and you then, I believe,
know that I stand in the most afflicting situation pos-
sible ! A man charg'd . . . with having inflicted pangs
on one lovely Creature, which, in their bitterest extent,
he himself now suffers from her sister. I love exist
but for Miss Siddons, and am decisively rejected by her,
He enclosed a missive (which has perished) for
Sally herself, and begged Mrs. Pennington to pass
it on, adding:
By a profligate daring I might see Miss Siddons, but
I cannot. Yet something I must do, and what better
than at once repose a confidence in a Woman of Sense
and Honour, trust implicitly to her Candour, nor
believe that I shall suffer by it till the suffering comes ?
I have done it, and perhaps all of my future happi-
ness is at stake and in your Power.
LAWRENCE 215
Partly because she was a kindly soul, and partly
because she shared the widespread feminine in-
ability to stand outside a love-affair, Mrs. Pen-
nington made Lawrence a conditional promise of
assistance. In his letter of thanks the lover burst
out: "Sally, dear Angel, shall I indeed see
you ! ! ! " He did not, at first, see the lovely
Creature. But he saw Mrs. Pennington instead;
and such was his " wretched madman's frenzy "
(to borrow Mrs. Siddons' phrase) that Mrs. Pen-
nington spoke him plain. She said, " I have seen
such scenes better acted before."
" This torment of a man," as Mrs. Pennington
called him, next confronted Mrs. Siddons herself.
He threatened suicide, but soon watered the
menace down to Switzerland. A letter from
Mrs. Siddons runs :
He told me some time ago, when he was as mad
about Maria as he is now about Sally, that if she
rejected him he would fly to compose his Spirit to the
mountains of Switzerland. Maria reigned sole arbitress
of his fate for two years or more. The other day he told
me if he lost Sally SWITZERLAND was still his resource.
In these detestable circumstances, Sally herself
was admirable. Answering one of Lawrence's
216 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
interminable and innumerable letters, Mrs. Pen-
nington acutely said :
I am inclined to think a great part of what lies before
me is rather written at dear Sally than to me ; and it is
only honest to tell you that she has the firmness to
resist taking any part in this correspondence, and will
neither peruse nor hear read your Letters nor my
Replys.
Poor Maria died, only nineteen years old, on
October 7, 1798. Lawrence, either by a pre-
sentiment or on the strength of something which
may have passed between himself and his aban-
doned sweetheart, had been haunted by the fear
that, on her death-bed, the unhappy girl might
exact a last promise from Sally destructive to his
hopes. These fears were justified by the event.
The day after Maria's death, Mrs. Pennington de-
spatched to Lawrence one of the most touching
letters ever penned. It is very long, and Mr.
Knapp's transcription of it should be perused in
extenso. Here is an extract :
But how am I to proceed ? How tell you that all
which youfear'd HAS HAPPENED ?
In her dying accents, her last solemn injunction WAS
given, and repeated some hours afterwards in the
presence of Mrs. Siddons. She calPd her Sister said
LAWRENCE 217
how dear, how sweet, how good she was that one only
care for her welfare pressed on her mind. " Promise
me, my Sally, never to be the wife of Mr. Lawrence.
I cannot BEAR to think of your being so." Sally evaded the
promise ; not but that a thousand recent circumstances
had made up her mind to the sacrifice, but that she did
not like the positive tye. She would have evaded
the subject also, and said, " dear Maria, think of
nothing that agitates you at this time." She INSISTED
that it did not agitate her, but that it was necessary for
her repose to pursue the subject. Sally still evaded the
promise, but said : " Oh ! it is impossible." Meaning that
she cou'd answer for herself, but which Maria under-
stood and construed into an impossibility of the event
ever taking place, and replied : " I am content, my dear
Sister I am satisfied."
. . She desired to have Prayers read, and followed
her angelic mother who read them, and who appeared
like a blessed spirit ministering about her, with the
utmost clearness, accuracy and fervor. She then
turn'd the conversation to you and said : " That man told
you, Mother, he had destroyed my Letters. I have no
opinion of his honour, and I entreat you to demand
them . . ." She then said Sally had promised her NEVER
to think of an union with Mr. Lawrence, and appealed
to her Sister to confirm it, who, quite overcome,
reply'd : " I did not promise, dear dying Angel ; but I
WILL and DO, if you require it." " Thank you, Sally;
my dear Mother Mrs. Pennington bear witness.
Sally, give me your hand you promise never to be his
218 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
wife ; Mother Mrs. Pennington lay your hands on
hers " (we did so) " You understand ? bear witness."
We bowed and were speechless. " Sally, sacred, sacred
be this promise." Stretching out her hand and point-
ing her forefinger " REMEMBER ME and God bless
you ! "
And what, after this, my friend, can you say to SALLY
SIDDONS? She has entreated me to give you this detail
to say that the impression is sacred, is indelible that
it cancels all former bonds and engagements that she
entreats you to submit and not to prophane this awful
season by a murmur . . . Tours she NEVER can y never
WILL be.
But Lawrence, who was not a religious man, 1
was too full of the desires of Life to bow before
the sanctities of Death. It would hardly be fair
to Mr. Knapp to copy here all of Lawrence's
reply to Mrs. Pennington, although it is only
thirteen lines long. He accused all concerned of
immeasurable deceit. Worst of all, he declared
that if Mrs. Pennington should mention the
scene at Maria's death-bed to a single human
being, he would pursue her name " with
execration." The lady, with excellent spirit,
disdained his "unmanly threat," and told him
1 He went out of his way to vaunt his eating of beefsteaks on a
fast-day.
LAWRENCE 219
that his further letters would be returned
unopened. Further, she forwarded his "dia-
bolical letter" for Mrs. Siddons' and Sally's
perusal. Sally wrote back : " Do not fear upon
my account, dearest friend ! Am I not bound by
a promise the most solemn, the most sacred is
not that sufficient to preserve me, even should
my own treacherous heart dictate a thought in
his favour ? . . . I will not say that weakness
shall never return ; but . . . whatever I may
feel, I will act as I have promised."
Lawrence was penitent and persistent ; but
Sally stood to her word. It was hard work.
Over a year later she said it was her constant
prayer to be kept aloof from " that being whose
fascination I have not the power to escape should
I be drawn within the circle of his magic." In
short, after the way of the world, Lawrence was
the first to be cured. Sally died in the spring of
1803. As Lawrence never married, Mrs. Sid-
dons very slowly came to have a sort of reverent
pride in the great man's supposed fidelity to her
dead daughter ; and, in her extreme old age, she
turned to her brother and said, " Charles, I wish
to be borne to my grave by you and Lawrence."
220 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
But the facts seem to show that she did
Lawrence a little too much honour. From the
scandal concerning himself and the Princess of
Wales in 1806, he was exculpated by the report
of the famous " Delicate Investigation " ; but
Fanny Kemble, who herself felt Lawrence's
fascination although he was forty years her
senior, has expressly recorded the existence of a
lady in significant weeds at the painter's funeral.
And there were others.
Apart from its human interest, the foregoing
account of Lawrence as a lover is worth giving
because of its bearing upon his art. Although he
painted some notable portraits of men, such as
his Pope Pius FII, his Cardinal Consahi, his
Prince Metternich, his Kemble as " Hamlet" his
Canning, his Castlereagh, and his Sir Walter Scott,
Lawrence made and keeps his reputation as a
flatterer of women. He flattered them with his
tongue, he flattered them with his pen, he
flattered them with his crayons, he flattered
them with his brush. There is a caressing,
philandering touch in his portraits of women
such as one could only get from a bachelor
carpet-knight. He once told Fanny Kemble
A CHILD WITH A KID
By
SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE
From the Painting in the National Gallery
LAWRENCE 221
how he had tried to paint a blush, " that most
enchanting c incident ' in a woman's face." The
famous Wagnerian conductor who testily told
his 'cellists that they were " all playing like
married men " would no doubt have been still
more aghast at the unmarried fondness of
Lawrence, which rings much more of senti-
mental calf-love than of grand passion. This
quality, which rightly estranges many English-
men from much of Lawrence's work, is probably
one of the reasons why Frenchmen are attracted
to it. To a Frenchman, Lawrence's gallery of
portraits is a silken seraglio with an " adorable
Eenglish Mees " on every divan. It is a French
critic who has exulted in Lawrence's fafon de
genie sen sue I et lascif, qui anime d'une vie extra-
ordinaire les aimables figures representees. 1 Never-
theless, in our insular arrogance, some of us
still suspect that we know more than any
Frenchman about our native art and artists.
1 Cf. the Gazette des Beaux Arts, 3me Priode, Tome V (1891), p. 133.
"Mais ce n'est point pour la connaissance des personnages dont s'occupent
les historiographes . . . que cet art de Lawrence est surtout precieux. II
vaut davantage encore a nous faire connaitre et aimer ces adorables jeunes
femmes dont a peine nous savons les noms, dont ainsi il nous est facile
d'imaginer a notre guise le temperament et 1'histoire. A ce point de vue,
aucun peintre n'est comparable a Lawrence. Aucun ne suggere comme lui
222 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Outside the affair of Sally, all Lawrence's
concerns prospered. Even the " Delicate Investi-
gation " did him more good than harm in the
long run. When Hoppner died, in 1810,
Lawrence reigned without a rival as a portrait-
painter. Honours were heaped upon him. In
1814 he was called home from Paris, whither he
had gone to see Napoleon's loot of pictures, to
paint the Allied Sovereigns and their ministers.
Two years later he was despatched to Aix-la-
Chapelle to complete the same task. The
Government paid him ^"1000 for his expenses
and sent out for his accommodation a portable
wooden house with a painting-room. At Aix,
kings and queens, princes and field-marshals,
chancellors and ambassadors were as plentiful
as blackberries, and Lawrence not only made
^"20,000 in a single year but was half buried
under jewelled snuff-boxes, medals, and other
glittering souvenirs. From Aix he continued his
triumphal progress to Vienna and Rome. After
so many pomps he found Rome at first " small."
un monde d'exquises imaginations, de respectueuses passions, intellectuelles,
de conversations id6ales. Scs modules feminins prennent dans ses tableaux
une vie si charmante et si familiere que pas un moment le respect du aux
ceuvres d'art ne nous empe'che de les adorer."
LAWRENCE 223
But the Pope housed him magnificently in the
Quirinal Palace, and he gradually came to feel the
grandeur of the Eternal City. He saw the
Vatican pictures, and agreed with Reynolds that
Michelangelo was superior to Raphael. At
Naples old Vesuvius showed a proper respect for
its distinguished visitor by glowing beautifully
at night.
Only two academicians dissenting, Lawrence
was elected President of the Royal Academy in
1820. He continued to draw vast sums of
money, but was always in debt. It has been
ungenerously hinted that the gaming-tables ac-
counted for his chronic impecuniosity : but it is
much more certainly known that he was generous
to his servants and the poor. Again, a great deal
of money went in purchasing the splendid collec-
tion of old masters which, following Reynolds'
example, he industriously gathered together.
This collection, most lamentably, was dispersed
all over Europe at his death. Happily Oxford
University possesses many of Lawrence's best
Michelangelo and Raphael drawings, but ever so
many other treasures were lost to this country
altogether.
224 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Towards the end of his life Lawrence turned,
with evident sincerity, to religion, and began to
find satisfaction in pious reading and godly com-
pany. Possibly it was this change which made
Mrs. Siddons herself something of a saint-
condone his behaviour of thirty years before.
Towards the end of 1830 he fell ill, and there
seems to have been gross carelessness in the way
the leeches were applied. On January 5, 1831,
while a book was being read aloud, a pain smote
him, and he said to his servant, " John, my good
fellow, this is dying.'* John replied, " Oh no,
Sir, it is only fainting." But his master's mag-
nificently brave words were true. It was the end.
Lawrence's funeral was a remarkable pageant
of mourning. But, when his estate was wound
up, barely anything remained for his heirs. His
fame, like Romney's, at once began to wane, but
is waxing once more. And certainly Sir Thomas
Lawrence deserves to be held in honourable
remembrance. Nearly everything that is dis-
likeable, both in his character as a man and his
work as an artist, can be explained by his
unfortunate boyhood. The marvel is that he
did not become a wholly selfish man and an
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
r y
SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE
From the Fainting
LAWRENCE 225
entirely objectionable painter. Of the eight
artists discussed in this book he stands eighth in
merit. But he did work that will live. His
Lady Peel; his Master Lamb ton ; his King of
Rome, and other delicious paintings of child-
hood ; and, above all, his extremely beautiful
drawings of heads, have rich artistic worth as
well as deep human interest. Nor must we ever
weaken in gratitude to the man who, despite the
effeminacy of his own art, enriched England
with the drawings of Michelangelo and pleaded
the cause of the Elgin Marbles.
TURNER
(1775-1851)
gPEAKING of Wordsworth, Mr. Julian Hill,
in his " Great English Poets," says : " As if
to seal him with the Great Seal of the kings of
English poetry, Death took him on April 23 the
anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and of Shake-
speare's death." Of course April 23 is also the
feast of St. George, patron of England. But
these coincidences do not exhaust the glories of
April 23, for it was upon this birthday and death-
day of Shakespeare that Turner "the Shake-
speare of landscape " as Tennyson called him
was born. 1 No great nation has been more neg-
ligent than England of its patron-saint : but St.
George has certainly said Adsum to the faithful
1 His biographers have written uncertainly on the point : but Turner
himself seems to have settled the matter by his bequest of 50 a year to
the Royal Academicians "for a dinner on his birthday, April 23."
226
TURNER 227
few who have invoked him with the old prayer
of Adsit pro Anglia.
Turner's birth is said to have taken place in
the year 1775. In later life he used to mystify his
acquaintances by saying that he was a much older
man than was commonly supposed : but 1775
appears to be the true date. Concerning his
birthplace and parentage there is less dispute.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter of
gods and heroes, was the son of a small barber ;
and the first home of this seer of temples and
castles, cathedrals and abbeys, ice-peaks and
thundering cascades, Venetian lagoons and the
ensanguined seas of Trafalgar, was the house
over (some say a cellar under) the barber's shop.
To be exact, it was No. 26 Maiden Lane, at the
corner of Hand's Court, Covent Garden. In
his days, as in ours, Covent Garden was London's
chief mart of fruit and flowers. Ruskin, who
said some of the right things about Turner in
the wrong way, made an excellently neat remark
on Turner's indebtedness to Covent Garden.
" His foregrounds," said Ruskin, " have always
a succulent cluster or two of greengrocery in the
corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in Covent
228 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Gardens of the Hesperides and great ships go to
pieces to scatter chests of them on the waves."
In addition to the shapely and gaudy wealth
of Covent Garden, the child Turner was blessed
with another brave daily show which never ceased
to colour his mind. Two minutes' scampering
would take him to the marge of the Thames.
And in Turner's time the Thames was a sight to
see. Even to-day, with its few good and many
bad bridges, it is one of the haunts best worth
a poetical painter's while. But, when Turner
was a child, its noble curve swept free. To-day
it is cut into compartments by the straight lines
of bridges and embankments. Again, in Turner's
time, it was a living highway of traffic. Stout
watermen rowed nobles and burgesses hither and
thither, while all shapes and colours of sailing-
craft cast or weighed their anchors, or churned
a purposeful way through the bronze water.
A barber's shop in Maiden Lane suggests to
the twentieth-century mind a narrow den where
the client's choice is between a threepenny "hair-
cut " or a twopenny shave. But Turner's father,
living in a wig-wearing and hair-torturing age,
was something better than a mere scraper and
TURNER 229
clipper. High business sometimes took him to
his customers' houses, and his son occasionally
went with him. Having seen a lion engraved
on a piece of plate, he returned home and made
a recognisable copy of the little beast on paper.
His father was impressed. Barbers are neither
deaf nor dumb ; and no doubt Mr. Turner had
heard more than a little talk among his clients
concerning the showers of guineas which de-
scended upon Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney
and the other fashionable portrait-takers of the
day. Therefore, when customers in want of
something to say, asked what the boy was going
to be, he would answer proudly, " William is
going to be a painter."
When he was ten years old the age at which
Lawrence began to support his family Joseph
William was sent to Brentford. Nowadays, the
man who boards one of the electric tram-cars
which have ruined Pope's and Kneller's and
Turner's Twickenham, will find it hard to believe
that George the First used to have his chariot go
slowly through Brentford because it reminded
him of Hanover. But behind the gas-works
and cheap and nasty shops of the tram-route
2 3 o GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
there still exist the charming, old-world Butts
where Turner's school-days were spent. Nor
have the rare beauties of the Brent Valley entirely
disappeared. The pilgrim who wanders in this
region must feel that the lad Turner did, after
all, have a chance. Best of all, his beloved
Thames ran even nearer to the Butts than to the
barber's shop in Maiden Lane.
Joseph William's first patron held the position
of foreman at the Brentford distillery. From
this proud height his hand lavished bounty
upon the little artist. On an average the fore-
man paid him fourpence apiece for colouring
about a hundred and forty engravings by hand.
A little later the schoolboy's works were on sale
at the Maiden Lane shop for a shilling each.
That they were worth every penny of the price
will be admitted by any one who has seen Folly
Bridge in the water-colour rooms of the National
Gallery. Folly Bridge, a shaded pencil-drawing
touched with colour, is dated 1787, which means
that when Turner drew it he was only twelve
years old.
At fourteen the boy set out for his second
school. It was at Margate, where he was able to
TURNER 231
gaze his fill at the open sea and the big ships.
A year later his artistic training began in earnest.
At fifteen he was an exhibitor in the Royal
Academy, and at eighteen he had finished the
accomplished and very beautiful Tintern Abbey,
now at South Kensington. An architectural
draughtsman was his first serious drawing-master,
and it was therefore natural that Turner should
shine first in architectural subjects. Besides,
there was money to be made by such work.
Although landscape painting, pure and simple,
was still an English artist's road to starvation, a
demand was growing up for topographical en-
gravings. While Reynolds, Romney, Lawrence,
Hoppner, and the others were painting thousands
of faces, less favoured but still prosperous
artists were drawing and engraving hundreds
of castles, abbeys, and, above all, country seats.
Thus, while the less famous men were picturing
the stately homes of England, their more re-
nowned brethren were portraying the noble
owners and their grand dames. Work of this
kind soon came Turner's way. He was sent
into Yorkshire, where, in addition to many other
drawings, he executed his Kirkstall Abbey.
232 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
When the writer of this book made a pilgrim-
age to Kirkstall Abbey he found it turned into a
public recreation ground. There was orange-
peel in an abbot's tomb, and children were romp-
ing on the site of the old Holy of Holies. But
in Turner's time the ruin was mouldering softly
beside the A ire, which before its pollution was a
beautiful stream. Ruskin maintained that Kirk-
stall Abbey first wooed Turner from the study
of man-made architecture to the study of God's
world of nature. This may just possibly be true.
But Ruskin went on to error. Himself unable
to practise his own art as a literary man without
perpetual preaching, he assumed that there must
be some message or moral in the art of the
painter Turner. Turner, he said, taught the
littleness of man's perishable works amidst
the grandeur of abiding Nature. "As the
strength of man to Giorgione," said Ruskin, so
" to Turner his weakness and his vileness."
Again : " In the Venetian's eyes all beauty
depended upon man's presence and his pride.
In Turner's, on the solitude he had left and the
humiliation he had endured." But this is quite
too literary. In preferring a richly crumbling
TURNER 233
and greenly mantled ruin to the hard planes and
angles and outlines of a naked modern building,
a painter is inspired aesthetically rather than
didactically or even reflectively. Non-natural
straight lines are abhorrent to the painter ; and,
to this extent, Hogarth with his " line of beauty
and of grace " taught a prime truth of art.
For many years after the so-called crisis of
his visit to Kirkstall, Turner went on making
architectural drawings with obvious heartiness.
His Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral^ his Holy
Island^ and, most wonderful of all, his Ely
Cathedral prove that the mutable works of petty
man had not become acutely painful to a pair of
eyes which had not been privileged with a sight
of the volumes of " Modern Painters." Mean-
while a factor was at work in his artistic education
of more worth than all his academic tutors put
together. At the print shop of John Raphael
Smith, where he was occasionally employed
colouring prints, he had made the acquaintance
of young Thomas Girtin, another print-colourer.
"Poor Torn/' as Turner called him in after
life, died at the age of twenty-seven, but he
worked long enough to show that he had it in
234 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
him to equal the very greatest of English artists.
Along with Girtin, Turner often visited Dr.
Munro, the art-loving physician who ministered
to George the Third in his madness. " Many
and many a time," said Turner afterwards, " did
Girtin and I walk over in the evening to Bushey
to copy Dr. Munro's valuable prints and to get
half a crown each for our work, and our supper
besides." At Dr. Munro's London house in
Adelphi Terrace, looking over the Thames, the
two youths often met De Wint, Cozens, and
other excellent artists who did much to establish
our noble schools of English landscape. But
Turner came to see that Girtin was the greatest
of them all : for he said in older age, " If
poor Tom had lived, I should have starved."
Having done well in Yorkshire, Turner
ranged through Scotland and Wales. It was
part of the bargain with his employers that he
should be paid his travelling expenses. One
hears it currently reported that twentieth-
century commercial travellers receive a pound
a day ; but Turner, a mere artist, took himself
less seriously. For example, his travelling bills
in Scotland totalled only about fifteen pounds ;
TURNER 235
and when the employer started at the smallness
of the amount, Turner indignantly challenged
him to do it himself for less.
Under the impulsion of some fine Vande-
veldts for Turner's originality generally needed
to be stirred up by the sight of a predecessor's
or rival's efforts Turner, in 1796-8, painted for
the Royal Academy's exhibition, Fishermen going
out to Sea, Fishermen going Ashore (Sunset\ and
Fishermen becalmed (Twilight). The wise saw that
these were no ordinary performances ; and when
in 1799 they were followed by the water-colour
Norham Castle, on the Tweed, his triumph was so
complete that he was elected an Associate of the
Royal Academy. In this characteristic work,
the hill-perched castle is almost centred in the
picture, with the setting sun burning behind its
dark mass and its own shadow bulking in the
water below. Long afterwards, when passing
the castle, Turner was observed offering it a
profound obeisance ; and he explained to an
inquisitive companion that he did so because
Norham Castle had brought him his first distinct
success, and that never afterwards had he lacked
either work or money.
236 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
As the new Associate of the Royal Academy
was just twenty-four years old, the experienced
reader will expect to encounter hereabouts a
paragraph or two concerning Turner's love,
courtship, and marriage. The little there is to
write makes sad reading. As a lad at Margate
he seems to have cast shy eyes upon the sister
of a schoolfellow. Margate and its inhabitants
always held warm corners in Turner's inscrutable
heart indeed, Ruskin complained that Turner
painted Margate too often and too punctiliously
and as soon as his prospects justified the
course he repaired thither and won the maiden's
consent. But there was a wicked stepmother
in the case. The carefulness of the young
painter in money matters often looked uncom-
fortably like downright meanness, and on this
and other grounds the stepmother disliked the
match. In order to frustrate it she used con-
temptible tactics. Turner, immediately after the
betrothal, departed on one of his professional
sketching-tours, probably in France, and all the
letters he wrote to his lady were intercepted.
Having no addresses to which she could write,
the poor girl perforce remained silent. Mean-
TURNER 237
while the stepmother, by harping daily on the
unfaithfulness of man in general and of Turner
in particular, was steadily advancing her own
plan of marrying her stepdaughter to a man
of means. The younger woman did not live
happily with the elder ; and when she became
unwillingly convinced that her lover had deserted
her she fell in with her stepmother's plans.
Turner appeared just before the wedding ; but
although the bride confessed that her heart was
still his, her head forbade her to withdraw her
hand from the second suitor. Her marriage, as
might have been expected, turned out unhappily.
As for Turner, he remained a bachelor and became
so indifferent a ladies' man that before he was
thirty-four he appeared to an eye-witness as
" the very moral of a master-carpenter, with
lobster-red face, twinkling, staring grey eyes,
white tie, blue coat with brass buttons, crabshell
turned-up boots, large fluffy hat, and enormous
umbrella."
His loss was our gain. From the hour of his
disappointment Turner lived for art alone. He
had his lapses into low pleasures, and, towards
the end of his life, he drank more than was good
238 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
for him : but, broadly speaking, his days were
work, work, work. Following Girtin, he increased
the flexibility of water-colour drawing to such a
point that his work could fairly be called water-
colour painting. Indeed, from a simply technical
standpoint, Turner wrought much more satis-
factorily in water-colours than in oils. Making
all due allowance for the gnawings and corrodings
of the London atmosphere, his oil-paintings, like
those of Reynolds, have lost their bloom too
young. This is apparent to everybody who has
seen the Turners in the Tate Gallery, which have
had to endure over fifty years' less exposure than
their fellows in the rooms at Trafalgar Square.
By 1802 Turner had taken the great stride.
He had "painted a Turner." This was his
Kilburn Castle. To a certain extent Norham
Castle and other pieces were also " Turners," but
they were commixed with elements derived from
Wilson, from Girtin, from Hearne, from Vande-
veldt. But Kilburn Castle, in the sound phrase
of Hamerton, was " a Turner and nothing but a
Turner." The style of a great man is as pro-
nounced as the mannerism of a little one : and,
when Turner fairly found himself, he produced
TURNER 239
works as immediately recognisable as are the
anaemic ladies of Burnc-Jones. It goes far to
establish the immortal greatness of Turner that
a work from his mature brush always cries out
" 1 am a Turner," as promptly and unanswerably
as a ripe work of Rembrandt cries out " I am a
Rembrandt/' or as a masterpiece of Velasquez or
of Constable boasts forth its father's name. Nor
were Turner's contemporaries blind to his merit.
Later on, he furnished a handy peg on which small
wits could hang old jokes about his pictures
looking better upside down : but, in his young
days, when he needed applause he received it.
Kilburn Castle led to his being made a Royal
Academician. The year of his receiving this
honour was also the year of poor Girtin's death,
and thenceforward Turner seems to have been
more than ever determined to take the first place
among English artists. More. He seems to have
resolved to outshine and outsoar not only his
compatriots and contemporaries but all his pre-
decessors, of every race, in his chosen field of
poetic landscape. Here was a grand ambition :
but there are many calm judges who believe that
Turner attained it.
240 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
This imperious resolve to brook no rivalry
led the painter into strange doings and sayings.
In choosing or tolerating a companion on a sketch-
ing-tour, he generally stipulated that his fellow-
artist should never sketch the scenes which en-
gaged Turner's own pencil. On varnishing days
at the Royal Academy he would not suffer any
neighbouring canvas to bid louder for applause
than his own. When he found the next picture's
red more vivid than his, he would lift a knifeful
of paint from another artist's palette and bring
his own work up to a sharper pitch. To learn
from fellow-painters he was so persistent that the
wife of De Loutherbourg once shut the door in
his face, on the ground that he had picked her
husband's brains excessively : yet he would never
suffer anybody to study his own methods or to
see him at work. He took tuition-fees from
pupils, and then let them go their own way, say-
ing that he didn't see why he should sell guinea
secrets for five shillings each.
Jealous and suspicious of the living, Turner
could not forbear to challenge the dead. Per-
ceiving the greatness of Claude, he set himself
to transcend it. He bequeathed his Sun rising
IIIEifi
TURNER 241
in a Mist and his Dido building Carthage to the
nation on condition that they should be hung
between two Claudes. His Liber Studiorum
was a deliberate retort to Claude's casual Liber
Veritatis. As for Vandeveldt, Turner's Dutch
Boats in a Gale was painted to prove that he could
make waves roll and spray sparkle and clouds
lower and winds blow as well as any Hollander.
Again, when in mature age Turner first saw Venice
and its treasures, he challenged the fame of the
Venetian colourists with those glowing master-
pieces painted on a white ground, of which homely
John Constable said : " They are golden visions
only visions, but still one would like to live
and die with such pictures."
Regarding the public as "a pack of geese,"
Turner was not above assisting them to appreciate
his performances. It is said that he came upon
a group of people at the Royal Academy stand-
ing before his 1803 Calais Pier, and that, point-
ing to the fish, he exclaimed, "And they say
Turner can't colour." This sensitiveness to a
public opinion which he affected to despise also
led him to waste time on toil which was not
proper to his genius. For instance, when young
Q
242 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
David Wilkie scored a success with his Pillage
Politicians^ Turner rushed into the arena with his
Blacksmith's Shop, making the fires of the forge
so bright that Wilkie's less lurid performance
was made to appear tame. As Wilkie at this
time was poor and still in his 'teens, Turner's
act does not look handsome ; and it looks un-
handsomer still when one contrasts it with the
painter's treatment of the wealthy and famous
Lawrence. Finding that his glowing Cologne:
the Packet B oat arriving dulled Lawrence's pictures
hanging beside it he went over Cologne with lamp-
black, saying, " It will all wash off, and Lawrence
was so unhappy." But it is fair to add that, in
old age, he repented nobly towards Wilkie. His
Peace : Burial at Sea, painted in 1842, represents
the obsequies of Sir David Wilkie off Gibraltar.
Turner himself wrote the lines inscribed under
the picture :
The midnight torch gleamed o'er the steamer's side,
And merit's corse was yielded to the tide.
And when he was reproached with the black-
ness of the funeral sails, he said, " If I could
find anything blacker than black I'd use it.'*
TURNER 243
In grand labours and small jealousies, beautiful
visions and sordid delights, Turner's motley life
marched on. His income was ample, and, for
the sake of appearances, he rented a house in a
good quarter, but he lived frugally, and rarely en-
tertained a guest of social importance. His com-
positions for such publications as the Southern
Coast Scenery, The Rivers of England, The Rivers
of Devon, and The Rivers of France required
frequent and long absences from London, and
his parsimoniousness as a traveller hardened
him into habits which were incompatible with
social popularity. But underneath the rough-
ness there was a man's heart. To his father,
who had suffered from the decline and fall
of high hair-dressing, the painter was more
than dutiful. Mainly for the old man's benefit,
Turner set up housekeeping at Sandycombe
Lodge, Twickenham, between Pope's Villa and
Richmond Hill.
Sandycombe Lodge was a temple of the simple
life. Old Turner, a thin, sharp-eyed, quick-
handed man, did not lag behind his offspring in
thriftiness. To save the fare to London, where
he still had the care of a wig or two, he would
244 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
ride on the market-gardeners* carts, perilously
poised atop of the vegetables. His provisions
he brought from a distant but cheaper market ;
and once a week the folk of Twickenham could
see him trudging home with his purchases tied
up in a blue handkerchief. As Turner had
a fondness for very long titles under his pic-
tures, one might have suggested that he should
execute a Morlandian work with the sub-
scription, Coming Home from Market: Turnip-carts,
with the Father of the Painter of " Hannibal and
his Army crossing the Alps" "Apollo killing the
Python" "Jason in search of the Golden Fleece"
" The Garden of the Hesperides" and " Dido and
ALneas leaving Carthage on the Morning of the
Chase" Within the Lodge itself equal frugality
reigned. The table was of deal, sparely covered
with a coarse cloth, the knives had horn handles,
the forks were two-pronged, the drink was drunk
from mugs, and the service consisted in jumping
up for what you wanted and getting it yourself.
Nevertheless, the two men were happy. They
had a boat for fishing and sketching, as well as
an ancient pony and chaise. A neighbour or
two relieved the monotony, and with the family
TURNER 245
of one of them, Mr. Trimmer, Turner would
unbend almost to merriment. Mr. Trimmer
was vicar of Heston : and tradition asserts that
if Miss Trimmer had proposed marriage to
Turner (there was a leap year during their ac-
quaintanceship) he would have been graciously
pleased to accept her. But she failed to do so,
and Turner's own shyness was too great for him
to make a move. Yet there were many chances :
for Miss Trimmer's reverend papa was teaching
Turner a little futile Greek in exchange for some
almost equally futile painting.
The narrow limits of this volume exclude a
full account of the inestimable Liber Studiorum,
which was begun in 1807. This work was aban-
doned when it was only three-fourths done, but
enough was accomplished to make the Liber
one of the grandest monuments in the world to
the genius of a single artist. The engravings
which compose it are exciting game for collectors
to track and chase, because Turner would some-
times alter the plate materially after the first
batch of impressions had been printed off. The
National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert
Museum, the British Museum, and the National
246 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Gallery of Ireland possess fine sets (not hung) of
the work, which can be seen by anybody who
will take the trouble to ask for them, and there
are also adequate photographic reproductions.
Of course. Turner's Liber out-Claudes Claude,
if only for the reason that the Liber Veritatis is
a collection of slight sketches, while the Liber
Studiorum is a full-dress exposition of landscape-
drawing in complete chiaroscuro.
The year after his Liber was taken in hand
Turner became professor of perspective at the
Royal Academy. But he could practise art much
better than he could preach it, and his discourses
were not good. Yet, although a sufficient supply
of the right words would never obey his tongue's
or his pen's command, Turner fancied himself
strangely as a poet and man of letters. For
nearly forty years he busied himself by fits
and starts with The Fallacies of Hope. The
merits of this production may be inferred from
the following extract, which, like most of the
other " Fallacies," was put forward as a sort of
an explanation of Turner's Hannibal crossing
the Alps.
rh
g ^
Q -
W
TURNER 247
Craft, treachery and fraud Salassian force,
Hung on the fainting rear ! Then Plunder seiz'd
The victor and the captive Saguntum's spoil
Alike became their prey ; still the chief advanced,
Look'd on the sun with hope ; low, broad and wan,
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italy's blanch'd barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguined deep with dead,
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll'd.
Still on Campania's fertile plains he thought,
But the loud breeze sob'd, " Capua's joys beware ! "
There are Turnerian touches in the fifth and
sixth lines of this dark utterance ; but never
again did Turner soar to an equal height of
poetry.
Not until he was forty-five years old did our
English Venetian visit Italy. Jumbling together
his small French and less Italian, he contrived to
reach Rome. On the way he fell in with an
Irish student, and the two stuck together ; but
they had been fellow-travellers for months before
either of the eccentric pair asked the other his
name.
Although Turner's drawings on his return to
England showed more brilliancy of colour and
a less heavy touch, two or three years passed
before the public were allowed to see what Italy
248 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
had done for him as a painter. In 1823 he
exhibited the Bay of Bai<e, with Apollo and the
Sibyl, a masterpiece whose still glorious ruins
are preserved in the National Gallery. Beautiful
even in decay, it makes a painter feel that he
would give six months of his life to have seen it
in its primal grandeur. Soon after Bai<e came
the Cologne^ already mentioned. His England
and Wales series, so sought of collectors, inter-
rupted his painting ; but at the end of 1828 he
went to Rome for a second time, and returned
to paint his most Turnerish Turners, including
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Ulysses deriding
Polyphemus, an even greater picture than the later
and more popular Fighting Tlmeraire tugged to
her Last Berth.
Old Mr. Turner died on Michaelmas Day,
1829. Turner's mother had died insane some
time before. With so little to hold him in
London, he gave himself up to perpetual
motion. Probably he went more than once to
Holland, and, in revisiting Scotland to illustrate
Scott's poems, he was nearly lost in the Isle
of Skye. But about 1832 Turner's great hour
struck. He saw Venice. How deeply his first
W
Sd
5
TURNER 249
sight of it must have moved him appears from
the fact that The Approach to Venice is the finest
of all the very fine Venetian pictures which
occupied so much of his energy during the
twelve years ensuing upon his sojourn in the
city. This wonder is in private hands ; but
the National Gallery has The " Sun of Venice "
going to Sea, and many more Venetian Turners,
including a number of water-colours. The
Venetian splendours overflowed into other
productions of Turner which portray non-
Venetian subjects, such as T^he Golden Bough.
At the same time Turner was at the apex
of his power in poetically rendering English
scenes. If the Victoria and Albert Museum
were in the heart of Morocco instead of
in South Kensington, a painter would be
repaid for the pains and perils of his going
thither by two of the Sheepshanks Turners
alone the St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall (1834),
and the Line-fishing off Hastings (1835). As for the
National Gallery Fighting Temeraire (1839), there
is no need to praise a work which hangs on a
hundred thousand English walls and is engraved
on a million English hearts.
250 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Ruskin believed that after achieving the
Fighting Temeraire Turner himself began to be
tugged to his last berth, and that his power
began to decline. Seeing that 'The Approach to
Venice came four years after the Fighting Teme-
raire^ his dictum is doubtful. But the critics of
the 'forties agreed with Ruskin, and the wits
began to make a butt of him. They called his
Snowstorm (1842) "soapsuds and whitewash."
Yet the history of this picture should make
even the cheapest buffoon in the world take off
his hat to Turner. In his love of nature a
love which, as the late Cosmo Monkhouse truly
said, was more intense than even his love of
fame and his love of money the old man of
nearly three-score years and ten caused himself
to be lashed for four hours to the mast of the
Margate steamer Ariel, in order that he might
study the storm at its heart. To Charles
Kingsley he said, " I did not expect to escape ;
but I felt bound to record it if I did." And to
Ruskin he said, " Soapsuds and whitewash !
What would they have ? I wonder what they
think the sea's like ? I wish they had been in
it." These things are worth remembering by
TURNER 251
those who have walked past the National Gallery
Rain, Steam, and Speed with patronising pity for
this supposed freak of a once great painter
sinking into senile decay. No doubt decay
did set in before Turner laid his brushes
aside, but the symptoms of it are not to
be found in his Deluge pictures and in his
Whalers. Like well -hung game-birds, the
Turners of the Rain, Steam, and Speed class
strike the general public as rife with decay,
but to the artistic gourmet they are alluringly
mature. Perhaps it would be flippant to call
them " high " art : but, in the French sense,
these are the high Turners.
After his father's death Turner lived mysteri-
ously. His house in Queen Anne Street was
bolted, chained, locked, and barred, and the
housekeeper stoutly repelled prying callers.
The artist did not exhibit all his new works,
and there were fine things at Queen Anne Street
which no pair of eyes save his own had seen.
In little affairs he was as mean as ever, haggling
over cab fares and over the difference between
pounds and guineas. But in big things he rose
above money. More than once he refused
252 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
scores of thousands of pounds for the pictures
in the Queen Anne Street house, because he was
determined to bequeath them to the nation.
Nearly all this time he was living a double
life. He had fallen in at Margate with a con-
genial landlady named Caroline Sophia Booth,
an illiterate but pleasant woman of dark com-
plexion. How far she stood to him in the
relation of Mrs. Turner is not positively known,
but it is said that, on learning her name, he
exclaimed, " Then I'll be Mr. Booth." And Mr.
Booth " he became. One day his fancy was
captured by a cottage at Chelsea, with a verandah
overlooking the river ; and, in company with
Mrs. Booth, he approached the landlord as a
would-be tenant. The landlord naturally re-
quired the applicants' names, together with
references, but this did not suit Mr. "Booth,"
who secured the place at last by paying the rent
in advance. Mistaking his roughness for that
of a retired sea-captain, the Chelsea people nick-
named their new neighbour "Admiral Booth,"
while the gamins knew him less respectfully as
"Puggy Booth." Turner was entirely success-
ful in concealing his false name and his secret
TURNER 253
haunt from his friends. Should any one put him
in a cab and demand his instructions for the
driver, he would answer, " order him to drive
to Oxford Street, and then I'll tell him where to
go." Even at the photographer's he concealed
his identity, describing himself as a master in
chancery. Yet he was willing enough to disclose
his true name when the case demanded it, as when
he said angrily "I am Turner. ... I did it"
to Halstead, a print-seller, who was disputing his
shabby customer's right to hold an opinion about
a soiled plate from the Liber Studiorum. What
followed is worth telling. Halstead, after con-
fessing that he had often wanted to see the great
Mr. Turner, added, "But I don't want to set
eyes on him again, for a more disagreeable fellow
I never met in my life." Turner left the
shop in wrath, but he darted back almost im-
mediately, thrust his head through the doorway,
and cried, " Halstead, God bless you ! "
On the death of Sir Martin Shee, Romney's
successor in Cavendish Square, Turner counted
on being elected President of the Royal Academy.
He was not elected ; and he did not exhibit at
the Academy again. Shee died in 1850. To-
254 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
wards the end of 1851 Turner's visits to Queen
Anne Street, always infrequent, ceased. His
housekeeper at last grew anxious, and found a
partial clue in an old letter in one of her master's
pockets. Inquiring at one little Chelsea shop
after another, she traced the great painter to his
little retreat, but not until he had begun the
last twenty-four hours of his life. When he
knew that the end was come, he asked that his
couch might be wheeled to the window. It was
a beautiful night, a week before Christmas, and
gazing upon the living waters of the Thames,
with his head on Mrs. Booth's shoulder, he
died.
At his own desire, Turner was buried beside
Sir Joshua Reynolds in the crypt of St. Paul's.
But in too many other respects the dead man's
wishes were ignored. He willed ^"60,000 for
the founding of an asylum for poor and old
artists at Twickenham, but this clause of his
testament, as well as others, was set aside on the
plea of the next-of-kin. Although the will was
clear enough for straightforward interpreters,
perhaps the Court of Chancery was bound to
uphold certain technical objections ; but nothing
TURNER 255
can justify the British nation's disregard of the
conditions attached to the bequest of pictures
which it has accepted. As these treasures in-
clude 362 paintings, 135 finished water-colours,
1757 studies in colour, and nearly 17,000
sketches, only a fraction can be shown : but now
that the five additional rooms of the National
Gallery are nearing completion, it is time for the
resurrection of many an unknown " Turner "
from the tin boxes in the cellars.
Turner ranks with Chaucer and Shakespeare,
Wellington and Nelson among the glories of
England. His work is almost creative, like a
god's. He adds mind to matter, spirit to sense,
man to nature. His visions arc true, with a
truth which transcends the beggarly elements of
common fact. To a lady's, " But I never see
such sunsets," he is said to have replied, " Don't
you wish, madam, that you did ? " His art is
nothing but nature nature raised to a higher
power. And this is the same as saying that the
painter Turner was a supreme poet.
Just as a near mound can shut off from our
eyes a far mountain, so Ruskin, with his literary
expositions of an imaginary, ethical Turner, has
254 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
wards the end of 1851 Turner's visits to Queen
Anne Street, always infrequent, ceased. His
housekeeper at last grew anxious, and found a
partial clue in an old letter in one of her master's
pockets. Inquiring at one little Chelsea shop
after another, she traced the great painter to his
little retreat, but not until he had begun the
last twenty-four hours of his life. When he
knew that the end was come, he asked that his
couch might be wheeled to the window. It was
a beautiful night, a week before Christmas, and
gazing upon the living waters of the Thames,
with his head on Mrs. Booth's shoulder, he
died.
At his own desire, Turner was buried beside
Sir Joshua Reynolds in the crypt of St. Paul's.
But in too many other respects the dead man's
wishes were ignored. He willed ^60,000 for
the founding of an asylum for poor and old
artists at Twickenham, but this clause of his
testament, as well as others, was set aside on the
plea of the next-of-kin. Although the will was
clear enough for straightforward interpreters,
perhaps the Court of Chancery was bound to
uphold certain technical objections ; but nothing
TURNER 255
can justify the British nation's disregard of the
conditions attached to the bequest of pictures
which it has accepted. As these treasures in-
clude 362 paintings, 135 finished water-colours,
1757 studies in colour, and nearly 17,000
sketches, only a fraction can be shown : but now
that the five additional rooms of the National
Gallery are nearing completion, it is time for the
resurrection of many an unknown " Turner "
from the tin boxes in the cellars.
Turner ranks with Chaucer and Shakespeare,
Wellington and Nelson among the glories of
England. His work is almost creative, like a
god's. He adds mind to matter, spirit to sense,
man to nature. His visions arc true, with a
truth which transcends the beggarly elements of
common fact. To a lady's, " But I never see
such sunsets," he is said to have replied, " Don't
you wish, madam, that you did ? " His art is
nothing but nature nature raised to a higher
power. And this is the same as saying that the
painter Turner was a supreme poet.
Just as a near mound can shut off from our
eyes a far mountain, so Ruskin, with his literary
expositions of an imaginary, ethical Turner, has
256 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
hidden the best of this towering man from our
sight. And, unhappily, certain writers on art, in
their recoil from Ruskinism, have uncritically
recoiled at the same time from Turner as Ruskin's
man. But if Ruskin had never been born, or
had never lived to cut a quill, Turner would
have been the same painter. Every year Ruskin's
mound recedes and dwindles ; and every year
Turner's mountain comes more hugely into view.
He is a mountain indeed an exceeding high
mountain. His roots are deep in the resounding
sea ; his flanks are rich with pastures for a thou-
sand flocks, with wind-bowed forests for strange
beasts, with castles and palaces for beautiful
women and strong men ; his torrents flash and
thunder in the sunset ; his dawn-reddened snows
are blent with glorious heaven.
CONSTABLE
(1776-1837)
pAINTING has both its poetry and its prose ;
and in painting, as in literature, the prose may
be almost as noble and satisfying as the poetry.
Of course the word prose which is too often
confounded with prosiness is here used in its
better sense, and therefore no sneer is intended
in saying that Constable, in contrast with the
poet Turner, was a prose-artist. Turner saw his
faerie world by the light that never was on sea
or land ; but Constable's useful cornfields swayed
for him in the light of common day. To pass
from Turner to Constable is like awaking from
golden and rosy dreams and to see through the
wide-open window a goodly English meadow girt
with leafy elms. As one returns to conscious-
ness, one feels a pang at the crumbling down of
the dream-palaces and the fading away of the
dream-gardens ; and yet, as the thousand thou-
R 257
258 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
sand brilliants of the dew flash amid the gold of
the buttercups, one's spirit leaps up like the lark,
and one is not sure that the good, solid, sun-
bright world of reality is poorer than the dream-
world after all.
When John Constable was born, on June n,
1776, he was so unpromising an infant that he
was christened before he was half a day old.
Far from foreseeing that he would make a mark
in the world, his parents expected him to hurry
straight out of it. But he was tougher than he
seemed. Quickly becoming a strong and healthy
child, he was able to receive his Latin verbs and
his frequent floggings like any other British boy
of the time. He went to good schools, for
Golding Constable, his father, was a substantial
man who owned two water-mills and two wind-
mills, as well as the roomy red-brick house at
East Bergholt, the Suffolk village in which John-
was born.
Of Golding Constable a pleasant anecdote
survives. He wished to transfer a bargee from
one cottage to another ; but, for a long time, the
man would neither remove nor give any reason
whatever for sticking so obstinately to the old
CONSTABLE 259
home. When, at last, the bargee broke silence,
he said, " If I leave this cottage I shall never be
able to shave again ! " It turned out that, for
many years, the Sunday razor- sharpening had
been performed on the top step, and that the
cottager despaired of finding such a home
anywhere else in the parish. " If that is all,"
said Golding Constable, " the carpenter shall take
up the step for you to carry away, and the stairs
too if you want them." It is also related of
this good man that he desired, on his death-bed,
to make reparation to any poor person or widow
or orphan of whose necessities he might have
taken advantage in the course of his business
life ; but the older mill-clerk ransacked his
crowded memory in vain to recall a single in-
stance of imperfect justice.
The picturesque tradition to the effect that
Rembrandt owed his distinctive chiaroscuro to a
childhood passed in the dim interior of a mill
may or may not be true. But it is certain that
the miller's son of East Bergholt never lost his
early impressions. Of the windmills which John
Constable painted in later life, his brother said :
" They will go round, which is not always the case
2 6o GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
with those painted by other artists." And of
one of his pictures of mills, David Lucas, the
engraver, expressly said :-
It was done to explain the altered shape of the vanes
in their different positions, for Mr. Constable pointed
out that, as the generality of artists represented them,
they would never turn round at all, whereas, if cor-
rectly done, a miller could tell not only what they
were doing inside, but the direction and force of the
wind blowing at that time.
As for the two water-mills at Flatford and
Dedham, they seized the child's mind still more
powerfully. Nearly everybody who knows
Constable at all, knows his Flatford Mill in the
National Gallery, and the alternative title of the
wonderful Leafing Horse is Dedham Lock. When
he was a man of five-and-forty, Constable, in a
letter to a friend, wrote : " The sound of water
escaping from mill-dams, etc. ; willows, old rotten
planks, slimy posts and brickwork I love such
things."
Young John, however, was expected by his
parents to be interested in mill-sails and mill-
wheels more as useful than as ornamental
objects. At Dedham, where he attended the
CONSTABLE 261
Grammar School, he had become the chum of
a superior plumber and glazier named John
Dunthorne, whose hobby was landscape-painting,
and John had been fired with ambition to paint
landscapes too. But Golding Constable wished
his son to be a clergyman ; and when he found
that the youth had no inclination towards the
ministry of the Church, he brushed aside the
idea of painting as a profession and set him to
work in the mill.
At Dedham lived the Dowager Lady Beau-
mont, mother of that Sir George Beaumont who
has been so much ridiculed for his brown tree.
But, in Constable's case, Sir George rendered
services to art so great that one could forgive
him not only his brown tree, but a pink butter-
cup or a blue moon. On one of his filial visits
to the Dowager he made Constable's acquaint-
ance, and, showing him some water-colours by
Thomas Girtin, he heartily counselled the young
miller to study them well. In addition to these
new productions of " Poor Tom," Sir George
also gave Constable a sight of a good Claude.
It was the picture called by some people The
Annunciation, and by others The Angel appearing
262 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
to Hagar^ and is now to be seen in the National
Gallery. Claude or Girtin, or both, made him
as unwilling to devote his life to the mill as to
the Church, and, at the age of nineteen, John
Constable was on his way to London as the
bearer of a letter of introduction to the artist
Farington.
But John Constable was neither a Lawrence
for dazzling precocity nor a Romney for dogged
perseverance. A short experience taught him
that art is a stern task-mistress, demanding long
days of bitter labour from every one of her
followers and rewarding only a very few with her
favours in the end. He soon began to question
his vocation, and his doubts were fostered by his
mother, who seems to have held the opinion that
painting for a living is hardly respectable, and
that there is no sufficient difference between a
serious painter and the "artist" on the sands
who collects the coppers for his supper by going
round with a hat. Besides, John loved the
country ; and the contrast between town and
village life was then less in the town's favour
than it is to-day. By the spring of 1797 he was
telling an intimate friend that he had awakened
CONSTABLE 263
from his dream, and that he was about to enter
heartily into his father's business.
Less than two years of business life sufficed
to settle his problem. Having seen both sides
of the question, John Constable accepted his
destiny. He knew that the apprenticeship to
painting, always laborious, would be more
laborious than usual in his case, because he had
reached the age of three -and -twenty without
once thoroughly beginning those plodding and
systematic exercises which most artists have
completed in their teens. But he knew, also,
that while a painter's career would be arduous,
any other would be dishonourable and unbear-
able. In the year 1800 he was admitted as a
student at the Royal Academy.
Benjamin West, who was President of the
Royal Academy in Constable's student-days, is
flouted even more scornfully than Sir George
Beaumont in our times. But, even if his own
canvases were indeed all hopelessly bad, West,
like Beaumont, would deserve honour for his
helping of Constable. West knew a great deal
about the craft of painting which artists do not
learn in a day, and he was generous in sharing
264 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
his knowledge. It was by a hint of West's that
Constable was led to search after that exquisite
silveriness which is one , of the distinctive
beauties of his best work. Nor did West stop
short at sowing sound technical suggestions in
the young man's mind. He also put courage
into his heart. " Don't be disheartened, young
man," he said. " We shall hear of you again.
You must have loved nature very much before
you could have painted this." Again, when
Constable was in danger of blunting the fine
but infirm edge of his talent by accepting a post
as drawing-master in a school, it was West who
came to the rescue. The affair was delicate ;
for Dr. Fisher (afterwards Bishop of Salisbury)
had secured Constable's nomination to this paid
post with the kindliest of intentions. Some-
body had to take considerable trouble in the
matter, and it was cheerfully taken by the
busy West. Having dissuaded Constable from
accepting the post, the President forestalled
Dr. Fisher's possible annoyance by breaking the
news of the refusal himself.
Thus delivered from danger, Constable began
to take his mission as seriously as one could
CONSTABLE 265
wish. To Dunthorne, the estimable plumber
and glazier, he wrote :
I am returned from a visit to Sir George Beaumont's
pictures with a deep conviction of the truth of Sir
J. Reynolds's observation that there is no easy way of
becoming a good painter. It can only be obtained
by long contemplation and incessant labour in the
executive parts. And however one's mind may be
elevated and kept up to what is excellent by the
works of the Great Masters, still Nature is the
fountain's head, the source from which all originality
must spring ; and should an artist continue his practice
without referring to Nature, he must soon form a
manner and be reduced to the same deplorable situation
as the French painter, mentioned by Sir J. Reynolds,
who told him that he had long ceased to look at
Nature, as she only put him out.
This document shows that although the writer
still needed " incessant labours in the executive
parts," he had already laid hold of sound prin-
ciples. Indeed, the letter clearly foreshadows
the Constable who uttered the famous saying
that he wished to paint as if he had never
seen a picture.
Until he passed the age of thirty Constable
painted nothing intrinsically valuable. His Christ
Blessing Little Children, painted in 1804 as an
266 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
altar-piece for Brantham Church, is weak and
poor. The thing pleased Constable's mother
and caused her to say that she "could perceive
no cause or just impediment " why her son
" should not, in due time, with diligence and
attention, be the performer of a picture worth
^3000." His second altar-piece, executed in
1809 for Neyland Church, drew from his uncle
a set of twenty-five criticisms, the most delight-
ful of which affirms that "it is scarcely justifiable
for any picture to be shown so raw, unless a
testimony be affixed that the artist died before
he could finish it." In addition to these un-
satisfactory altar-pieces, Constable turned out
some undistinguished portraits ; but he had still
to find himself as a landscape-painter.
It was not only in painting that John Constable
was slow in knowing his own mind and in
realising his ambitions. As a man, and not
merely as an artist, he lacked imperiousness.
At the age of twenty-four he had met Maria
Bicknell, daughter of a London solicitor, and
grand-daughter of a Dr. Rhudde, the rector of
Bergholt ; but not until he was thirty-five did
he become sure that the lady had lit in his breast
CONSTABLE 267
the fires of love. No wonder that his mother,
in another connection, once wrote to him, " Do,
my dearest son, exert yourself, or you must pine
away your own prime and fret away the aged
remnant of your parents' lives." The wooing
and winning of Miss Bicknell required tact and
dash ; for the damsel's grandfather disapproved
of the match, and her family feared that she
might he disinherited. But Constable quailed
before the obstacles too meekly. Having been
known as "the Handsome Miller," he might
soon have had his way if he had not forgotten
the old wisdom about faint hearts and fair ladies.
Altogether, John Constable's timid siege of
Maria Bicknell lasted five years. His active
operations were confined to the discharge of
some mild and prudent love-letters. Indeed,
to everybody who knows the circumstances,
Hamerton's eulogy of John Constable's and
Maria Bicknell's beautiful and faithful romance
would be amazing if Hamerton's Autobiography
had not so clearly defined his own limitations as
a lover. The truth is that Constable's courtship
is only edifying in parts. The lovers were not
wholly without means, and Constable had his
268 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
health, his leisure, and his profession. Yet the
pair waited until the bridegroom was forty,
rather than jeopardise a legacy from a crusty old
man. Constable, it is true, was for an immediate
marriage and for letting the money go ; but his
campaign lacked spirit, and for years he endured
the humiliation of receiving bulletins from
sisters, cousins, and aunts as to the peppery
rector's varying states of mind. This poor state
of things might have lasted much longer if
Dr. Rhudde had not suddenly " ceased to regard
Maria as his grand-daughter" through hearing
dreadful news to the effect that John had been
meeting her and speaking to her in her own
father's house. He renounced Maria in "such
a letter " that the poor creature " trembled with
having heard only part of it read."
Mr. Bicknell counselled more delay, meekness,
forbearance, and discretion ; but even Miss
Bicknell's prudence and patience had their limits,
and the marriage was celebrated in London on
October 2, 1816. The excellent Fisher tied the
knot in the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields.
What would have been the bridegroom's thoughts
and acts if, as he stood on St. Martin's steps, he
CONSTABLE 269
could have foreseen the crowds who daily ascend
the other stone staircase, just across the road,
to look at The Valley Farm, and Tbe Cornfield^ and
The Cenotaph^ and The Glebe Farm, and Flatford
Mill) and Barnes Common ?
Dr. Rhudde, as might have been expected, soon
came to forgive and even to admire the spirited
retort of his grandson-in-law and his grand-
daughter to the challenge he had thrown down.
At first he rumbled out a conventional amount
of stage-thunder, but his long-brandished bolt
was never hurled. Not long after the nuptials
the bridegroom received a letter from Abram
Constable, his brother, containing the following
passage :
Mr. Travis [Dr. Rhudde's medical man] told us he
had seen the Doctor the day before my sisters called
there, and found him at first rather violent, but soft-
ened considerably before he left him. He said, " I'll
not leave her a shilling." Mr. T. replied, " For God
in oven's sake, Doctor, think of what you are doing,
persecuting her in your life and after your death too ;
pray consider this. I'll tell you what Mr. Nann has
done with his daughter, and no child can have treated
a father worse than she has done ; he has left her a child's
part, secured to her and to her children, if she has
any, and left her husband out of the question." The
2 70 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Doctor replied, " Then I will do the same, and leave
Maria a child's part ; but with some little difference,
for acting contrary to friends' wishes." On parting,
Mr. T. said, " You will not depart from what you
have said, Doctor ?" He replied, " I will not." Thus
far is something at this early stage, and not only
Travis, but all in the village and around us are friendly
to you, and I have no doubt things will work round,
and that we may still see you and your deservedly
beloved Maria received graciously at the Rectory.
It is true that, a few weeks later, the tyrant
declared that he would refuse to see the newly-
wedded pair in the event of their coming to
Bergholt ; but Christmas and the New Year
recalled him to such a state of grace that Con-
stable's sister Mary was able to report further
progress. She passed on to her brother a
gracious hint from the Doctor to the effect that
if John would " make a proper apology to Mr.
Bicknell and himself," all might be forgiven and
forgotten. A complete reconciliation soon fol-
lowed, and the errant pair were once more per-
mitted to enter the Presence. Dr. Rhudde kept
his word, and wrote down Maria in his will for
^4000. Readers who wish to inform themselves
minutely concerning the whole affair will find
CONSTABLE 271
sufficient particulars, including many of the
lovers' discreet love-letters, in Leslie's Memoirs
of John Constable, R.A., which was admirably
amended and reprinted a few years ago by
Leslie's son.
Not until he had been married nearly three
years did a painting by John Constable deeply
impress the public. In 1814 he had sold two
pictures ; but the purchaser of one of them, a
Mr. Allnutt, who very properly resided in
Clapham, had employed Linnell to paint out
Constable's sky, and to paint in another of his
own. 1 Flatford Mill had been almost ignored.
But in 1819 The White Horse bore him into his
own. This work, originally known as A View on
the Stour, led to the artist's election as an
Associate of the Royal Academy, and brought
him fame and praise. But he had to wait for
material rewards. Fifteen years ago The White
Horse, which is now the property of Mr. Pierpont
Morgan, changed owners for 6200 guineas ;
1 A few years later, when the artist was becoming famous, Mr.
Allnutt approached Constable and asked him to restore the altered picture
to its prime state. At the same time, however, he begged that the canvas
might be cut down so as to match a picture by Callcott. As Allnutt had
been his first buyer, Constable did not show him the door, but painted him
a new picture, refusing to receive payment.
272 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
but its original price was 100 guineas only.
Even this modest figure was unreal, for the
Horse's first buyer was Constable's friend Fisher,
from whom the artist bought it back for the
exact sum he had paid for it. In such circum-
stances it was fortunate that Constable and his
wife had little fortunes of their own. From his
father's estate, Constable received ^4000 ; Dr.
Rhudde's legacy amounted to ^4000 more, and
in 1828 Mr. Bicknell left his daughter ^20,000.
The National Gallery Hay-wain, originally and
less happily known as Landscape : Noon, dates
from 1821. But the critics and Constable's
brother painters, to say nothing of the public,
lacked inward preparations and dispositions for
the understanding of Constable's works. He
himself said, "The Londoners, with all their
ingenuity as artists, know nothing of the feeling
of a country life (the essence of Landscape),
any more than a hackney-coach-horse knows of
pasture." During the eighteenth century, with
its urban standpoint, the best traditions of
Dutch and Italian landscape-painting had almost
perished out of the world. Rocks, bushes, and
waters were grouped and painted primarily as
CONSTABLE 273
a background or theatre for human actions and
passions. Together with ruins and brown trees,
these objects were built up by conventional rules
of composition, into stage-pictures appropriate to
a mythological or allegorical masque. The close
botanical and geological observation which is
evident to an excess in so many modern works
was almost entirely absent from the canvases of
Constable's predecessors. Like the toy-makers
of the Black Forest, who have agreed upon a peg
with a curly cone atop as the symbol of a tree,
so these painters made certain conventional
brush-marks take the places of recognisable oaks
or elms, or beeches, or chestnuts. Even Gains-
borough, who began by painting the oak with
amazing insight and sympathy, drifted into a way
of slapping vague foliage and uncertain trunks
and branches into his backgrounds. Richard
Wilson, who was a very great artist in many
respects, might have painted finer landscapes than
Constable's ; but the classical tradition held him
back. " Old Crome," whose Mousehold Heath is
in the National Gallery, did great things and had
it in him to do greater ; but he passed his whole
life in Norwich, and failed to correct his devotion
s 273
274 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
to Hobbema by opening his mind to contem-
porary influences. Girtin, the first complete
water-colour painter, achieved very high things
in his short life. But it would seem that the
greatest painters must be painters in oils, just as
the greatest musicians must use the full orchestra ;
for the water-colour medium, at its best, is
capable of no more than a grand piano. As for
Turner, the poetic landscapes which he was
painting when Constable emerged from obscurity
were acceptable to the public largely because
they appeared to be imbued with the current
Romanticism. Constable believed that ther^
was " room for a natural painter " ; but only a
few agreed with him until after he was dead.
At the time of The Hay-wain Constable was
living in Keppel Street, Russell Square ; but,
like Dr. Johnson, he considerately kept his wife
in the purer air of Hampstead. Devoted to his
family, he repaired to the Heath as often as
possible, and there are many sketches in the
London galleries to show how he spent his
hours on the breezy northern heights. Probably
he was the first artist to make use of oil-paints
for the memoranda which every true landscaper
CONSTABLE 275
painter must accumulate face to face with nature.
Leslie had twenty of the fifty sky-studies which
Constable made in the summer of the year 1822
alone. They were done on large sheets of thick,
absorbent paper. On the back of each was
noted the date of its execution, with the time of
day, the direction of the wind, and any other
serviceable particulars.
For a large River Stour, in 1822, Constable
received an offer of jo from the prescient
dealer Arrowsmith, who wished the Englishman's
pictures to be seen at the Paris Salon ; but
Constable thought it would be " disgracing his
diploma to take so small a sum," and that it
would be " too bad to be knocked down by a
Frenchman." In 1823 he produced his Salisbury
Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds, a picture in
which the architectural element is certainly not
despicable. Like all his greater pictures, it cost
him long and hard labour, and, to recruit his
health, he spent an alleged holiday with Sir
George Beaumont at Coleorton ; but so much
time was devoted to indoors copying of Sir
George's Claudes that Constable returned home
with a conviction that Claude and Ostade were
276 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
" the most perfect of all masters of real chiaro-
scuro," and with a neuralgia which forbade solid
food for a fortnight.
Unhappily, Constable refused to live a healthy
life. For a worshipper of Nature he had an
almost unparalleled antipathy to exercise either
on a horse's legs or on his own. He never
walked ; he strolled. When he was dragged off
one day by the lusty old Stothard, who never
donned a great-coat or boarded a hackney-coach
in his life, Constable was early at work among
the sandwiches, and, on reaching a crystal spring,
he was found to have brought a tin cup and a
bottle of rum. Nor did he correct his sluggish
physical habits by a keen and varied intellectual
life. Leslie believed that Constable did not read
a single novel all his days. Of Miss Mitford's
Our Village he wrote that it was " childish and
unnatural," and that it seemed " done by a
person who had made a visit from London for
the first time, and, like a Cockney, was astonished
at everything she saw." Even in his pictures
he denied himself the stimulus of charming
variety to such an extent that Dr. Fisher candidly
reminded him of the popular saying about the
CONSTABLE 277
works of Claude, "When you have seen one you
have seen all," and added, " I hope you will
diversify your subjects this year as to time of day.
Thomson, you know, wrote not four summers,
but four Seasons. People get tired of mutton
at the top, mutton at bottom, and mutton at the
side, though of the best flavour and smallest size."
Despite his unvigorous health, Constable, as an
artist, rapidly rose to his full stature as he neared
his fiftieth year. Of his picture The Lock he
truly said, in 1824, "My Lock is now on my
easel ; it looks most beautifully silvery, windy,
and delicious ; it is all health in the absence of
everything stagnant." At the Royal Academy
The Lock was duly admired. Fuseli (the author
of the well-known saying, " Constable always
makes me call for my great-coat and umbrella ")
found this canvas so delightful that he made a
pilgrimage to it, leaning on the porter's arm,
every Sunday during the continuance of the
Academy's exhibition. The year of The Lock
was also the year of Constable's first vogue in
France. Arrowsmith, the naturalised French
dealer, gave the artist ^250 for two large
pictures with the little Yarmouth thrown in.
278 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
There are those who assert that the great
school of French landscape-painting derives from
Huet and Michel rather than from Constable ;
and there can be little doubt that, if others have
been willing to follow, Huet and Michel were
capable of showing the way. But, as a matter
of history, it is not fairly deniable that Constable
was the occasion of this particular French revo-
lution. As early as June, Arrowsmith wrote :
" No objects of art were ever more praised or
gave more general satisfaction than your pic-
tures." Constable's friend, Brocheden said :
" The French have been forcibly struck by
them, and they have created a division in the
school of the landscape-painters in France. . . .
The next exhibition in Paris will teem with your
imitators." Michel himself, years afterwards,
recorded the fact that Delacroix repainted one
of his own pictures after seeing Constable's.
Delacroix called the Englishman " un veritable
reformateur." But the most striking testimony
is from the pen of the enemy. One Henry
Phillips, "a most intelligent and elegant-minded "
schoolmaster, to whom Constable kindly lent a
hundred pounds, made a lame translation of a
CONSTABLE 279
Parisian attack on his friend, and sent it " with
Mr. Phillips's compliments to Mrs. Constable."
Here are some suggestive excerpts :
Almost all artists have seen two English Land-
scapes lately sent to Paris which, it is said, are to
make part of our next Exhibition at the Museum. . . .
Painted in a style so different from that of our school,
these two pictures at first sight produce an effect to
which we are not accustomed. We soon become
familiar with the manner of the author's painting, and
we experience the same pleasure as the greater num-
ber of artists in seeing the vigour and richness of
tone which predominate in these Landscapes, where
the colour is the first and perhaps the only quality
which we meet with. Seduced by this quality which
they have found, certain artists, light and changeable,
like a great many other Frenchmen, soon exclaimed
" A miracle ! " They have concluded that to do
well they must imitate the English, because they
understand colouring. This foolish enthusiasm . . .
was all that was necessary to turn rapidly our young
artists towards a style which ... if care be not
taken, can only be considered as the impudence of a
false imagination and a violation of truth in every
direction.
After further denouncing the style of the
deplorable Englishman on the ground that it
280 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
freed the artist from all severe study, this French
critic went on :
Let us then examine with care these English paint-
ings, the object of conversation amongst all the artists
and amateurs. . . . Suppose for a moment the two
pictures deprived of colour, but preserving faithfully
the form of the objects, what remains ? Nothing.
On the same principle Keats's Nightingale is
nothing because, if it were denuded of its verbal
colouring and melody, the propositions it con-
tains are questionable as hard facts. Of course,
Constable's glory is what he called " the evanes-
cence of the chiaroscuro " expressed directly by
subtleties of local colour. Constable was not a
draughtsman, adding dead afterthoughts of colour
to black and white. He was a painter. But the
Parisian cried out angrily :
Artists, tell us, Is this what you admire ? Then
the noble, the celebrated Poussin is no more anything
in your eyes ; he did not even know the sublime art.
His paintings, always beautiful, grouped with so much
taste in the midst of large clumps of trees ; his grounds
so rich, where mountains predominate by their impos-
ing aspect, all that is mere dotage ! all that must yield
before a wretched barrack simple in design, backed
with enormous cauliflowers and brooms which you will
call trees.
CONSTABLE 281
Notwithstanding these laments, Constable
triumphed at the Louvre so completely that,
after a few weeks, his pictures were removed from
merely good positions to places of honour on the
gallery walls. Louis XVIII sent the painter a
gold medal, which was a great satisfaction to him :
but it is to Constable's credit that in announcing
the good news to Fisher, he added, " I can truly
say that your early notice of me, and your friend-
ship to me in my obscurity, was worth more, and is
looked back to by me with more heartfelt satisfac-
tion than this and all the other notice I have met
with put together."
At Lille, which ranks next to Paris as a French
centre of art, The White Horse was heartily ac-
claimed, and a second gold medal was soon on
its way to England. It is worth noting that these
honours were acceptable to Constable largely
because they fortified his self-confidence as against
the overpowering Turner. He said, " I daily
feel the honour of having found an original
style, and independent of him who would be
Lord over all I mean Turner." Thus exulting,
he was inspired to produce Ihe Leafing Horse,
now one of the chief treasures of the Diploma
282 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Gallery at Burlington House. Along the towing-
path of the River Stour the bargees were fre-
quently confronted by the farmers' boundary-
fences, which were continued, without gates,
from the fields right into the water. The well-
conditioned boat-horses of Constable's day were
trained to leap these fences, as represented in the
picture. The bright crimson fringe on the
horse's trappings, which contrasts so happily
with the greens, is a departure from strict realism,
and was invented by Constable as a deliberate
pictorial effect an unusual procedure with this
painter. After visiting The Leafing Horse in the
Diploma Gallery, it is worth while to go straight
to South Kensington and to examine the magnifi-
cent full-size sketch in the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
A quarrel with Arrowsmith, in which the
picture-dealer does not appear to have been the
offender, threw Constable into a little financial
anxiety in 1825, and the ill-health of his family
did not mend his spirits. Nevertheless he
wrought, for the Academy of 1826, the magnifi-
cent Cornfield now in the National Gallery, and,
for 1827, the beautiful National Gallery Glebe
THE , CORN FIELD
By
"JOHN CONSTABLE
From the Painting in the National Gallery
CONSTABLE 283
Farm. It was about this time that his father-in-
law left the ^*2o,ooo legacy which enabled
Constable to " stand before a six-foot canvas
with a mind at ease." But his mind was not at
ease for long. In 1828 Maria Constable died.
Thenceforward John Constable became a sad
and silent man. A few weeks after his wife's
death he was made a Royal Academician ; but he
never recovered a light heart, and it is on record
that he sat next to young Frith through a long
dinner without speaking a single word.
The bereaved painter sought distraction in
planning and executing, along with David Lucas,
the engraver, his grand Liber Veritatis called
Various Subjects of Landscape characteristic of English
Scenery. The splendid mezzotints of this series
proceeded from a smaller brain than that which
conceived the Liber Studiorum : yet Constable's,
in its own way, is as precious a work as Turner's.
In his Introduction the painter boldly confesses
his realistic faith. "The subjects of all the
plates," he said, " are from real scenes, and the
effects of light and shadow are merely transcripts
of what happened at the time they were taken."
He also sounded a patriotic note by expressing
2 8 4 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
the hope that his " little work " would promote
a love of the scenery of our own country.
Altogether about forty plates were engraved :
but only about half of these were published in
Constable's lifetime. They vary greatly in
merit, and there is truth in the gibe about the
blacker ones looking "as if all the chimney-
sweepers in Christendom had been at work upon
them " : but the best of the Lucas-Constable
mezzotints are glorious beyond all praise. In-
deed, they are so fine that Constable's public
could not appreciate them sufficiently to pay the
expenses of production.
Illness and discouragement did not prevent
the finishing of Constable's Waterloo Bridge in
1832. On and off, he had been engaged for
fifteen years on this picture, which represents the
ceremonious opening of the Bridge on January
1 8, 1817. As usual, he made several prepara-
tory oil sketches, of which some have survived.
The finished canvas, now in the Tennant col-
lection, is the picture which Turner treated so
ungenerously. Leslie tells the story as follows :
It was placed in the school of painting, one of the
small rooms of Somerset House. A sea-piece by Turner
CONSTABLE 285
was next to it, a grey picture, beautiful and true, but
with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's
Waterloo seemed as if painted with liquid gold and
silver, and Turner came several times into the room
while he was heightening with vermilion and lake
the decorations and flags of the City bargees. Tur-
ner stood behind him, looking from the Waterloo to
his own picture, and at last brought his palette from
the large room where he was touching another
picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, some-
what bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea went
away without saying a word. The intensity of the
red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his
picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Con-
stable to look weak. I came into the room just as
Turner left it. " He has been here," said Constable,
" and fired a gun." On the opposite wall was a pic-
ture, by Jones, of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
in the furnace. "A coal," said Cooper, "has bounced
across the room from Jones's picture and set fire to
Turner's sea." The great man did not come into
the room again for a day and a half ; and then, in the
last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed
the scarlet seal he had put upon his picture and shaped
it into a buoy.
Apart, however, from Turner's characteristic
behaviour, Waterloo Bridge pleased neither painters
nor laymen. Having attained mastery in the
use of the brush, Constable seems to have
286 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
become a little bored with this tool of his trade,
and he was a trifle too ready to take up the
palette-knife in its place. The result was an
expanse of pigments displayed in a manner for
which few people were prepared. Nor was the
failure of Waterloo Bridge Constable's only trouble
in 1832. Death beckoned away several friends,
including the kindly Bishop Fisher; illness camped
round about his home, professional intrigues
embittered his work. " I do not contemplate a
happy old age," he wrote sadly to Leslie, " even
if I should attain it."
By this time Constable was nearer sixty than
fifty, and only four years remained to him. But
these years were not his worst. They were
greatened by those noble works Salisbury Cathe-
dral from the Meadows and The Valley Farm.
The Salisbury Cathedral is in private hands ; but
nearly everybody knows its double rainbow and
its marvellous sky from Lucas's mezzotint. As
for The Valley Farm, hardly anybody visits the
National Gallery without paying it due honour.
Through the kindness of Mr. Hugh Lane,
whose enthusiasm for contemporary achievements
in the interpretation of landscape has not blinded
THE VALLEY FARM
By
JOHN CONSTABLE
From the Qil-Skctch in the possession of Hugh Lane, Esq.
CONSTABLE 287
him to their fountains and origins, the present
volume is enriched with a reproduction of a
large sketch of The Valley Farm which the reader
can compare for himself with the finished picture.
We know a good deal about The Valley Farm
from Constable's pen as well as from his brush
and his knife. With his fondness for arid titles
the painter first named it c/f view of Willy Lorfs
House, and he said of it :
I have got my picture into a very beautiful state ;
I have kept my brightness without spottiness, and I
have preserved God Almighty's daylight, which is
enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of
old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand
guineas each, cart-grease, tar and snuff of candle.
On the point of brightness without spottiness
the Spectator did not agree with the painter.
" Constable has spoilt a charming rustic scene,"
wrote the critic, " by showing it, as usual, as
if a shower of sleet were falling from a summer
sky. He prefers his mannerism to his fame."
To some extent the artist recognised the
criticism as just ; for he worked further on
the canvas until he believed that he had " con-
verted the sleet and snow into silver, ivory, and
288 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
a little gold." The Spectator had declared, in
earlier numbers, that showers of meal kept fall-
ing in Constable's foregrounds, and that he was
" carrying on a Meal-Tub Plot against Nature."
But probably the Spectator s man had never
gazed with a painter's eye at a wet landscape
sparkling under a bright sun. Constable knew
what he was about. When Lady Morley, on
seeing his Englefield House, cried, " How fresh,
how dewy, how exhilarating ! " he replied,
" Half of what you have said, if I deserved it,
would be worth all the talk and cant about
pictures in the world."
Before completing Salisbury Cathedral from the
Meadows and The Valley Farm, Constable began
his short career as a lecturer on Landscape Art.
It was congenial work. Indeed, his father must
have had discernment when he planned that the
youth should enter the ministry of the Church ;
for John Constable was so confident a public
speaker that he did not need to prepare an
extended manuscript, but delivered his dis-
courses from a few rough notes. His first
lecture, at Hampstead, " went off immensely
well." He spoke an hour and a half, and was
THE VALLEY FARM
f By
JOHN CONSTABLE
From the Painting in the National Gallery
CONSTABLE 289
not once flurried. Encouraged by this success
he visited Worcester in 1835, an< ^ g ave three
lectures there. A long and interesting summary
of his remarks appeared in The Worcester
Guardian for October 3ist, 1835, a reprint of
which may be found in the Earl of Plymouth's
excellent little monograph on Constable. 1 The
Worcester reporter's readable paragraphs abound
in misstatements of historical fact and heresies
of aesthetical doctrine ; but most of these were
probably the reporter's own, for Constable
affirmed that the Guardian's editor, a very
pleasant person, had " mangled, mixed up, and
contradicted " all he had to say.
Theorising about art did not cause the
lecturer to slacken in the practice of it. At
Arundel, where he spent a pleasant July, he was
so diligent that he filled jars and bottles with
the earth or sand of particular spots in order
to remind himself of their hue when he returned
to his Hampstead studio. He would also collect
lichen-covered bark and other objects appro-
priate to his pictures.
1 See pp. 130-5 of John Constable, R.eA. t by Lord Windsor. London,
1903.
T
290 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
Strangely enough, the last important work
which Constable completed was a picture of a
painter's empty tomb. Sir George Beaumont
had erected at Coleorton a monument in-
scribed with the name of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
and Constable, in The Cenotaph^ has drawn the
stone with a deer gazing through a delicate
tracery of trees. The Cenotaph^ which is in the
National Gallery, has been underrated by some
of Constable's admirers., who would like to see
him scattering the contents of his meal-tub over
every one of his pictures and turning on his
sleet-storm both in and out of season. But
these methods were uncalled for in the simple
and poetical Cenotaph^ and Constable, whatever
the Spectator might say to the contrary, was not
bound hand and foot to his mannerism.
On the last day but one of March, 1837,
Constable saw a little beggar-girl hurt herself in
the street. He crossed the roadway and cheered
her up with a shilling. Leslie was with him,
and the two friends parted laughing. On the
morrow Constable worked hard at his Arundel
Mill and Castle^ afterwards strolling out on an
errand of charity. He came home and supped
CONSTABLE 291
heartily ; and in the same night he died, prob-
ably from an acute attack of the indigestion to
which his sedentary habits had given rise. He
had not completed his sixty-first year, and his
powers as a painter had not largely abated.
Had he lived longer there would have been a
few more great and beautiful things in the world.
One of the many bad turns which Ruskin has
done to art was his disparagement of Constable.
Living among people whose idea of literary
criticism was to make foolish comparisons be-
tween Dickens and Thackeray, the literary
Ruskin was incapable of talking Turner up with-
out talking Constable down. He declared that
he had " never seen any work of Constable's in
which there were any signs of his being able to
draw " ; that he had a morbid preference for
subjects of a low order ; and that his storms
were "greatcoat weather and nothing more."
Such remarks stultify Ruskin's praise of Con-
stable as " thoroughly original, thoroughly
honest, free from affectation, manly in manner,
and frequently successful in cool colour." In
writing such a redundancy as " thoroughly honest,
free from affectation," Ruskin cannot have been
292 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
in an attentive mood, and this was not the only
occasion when he failed to set his full wits fairly
to work on Constable's case.
To those who insist that some contrast be-
tween Turner and Constable must be made, it
is enough to say that the very great Turner did
much more than the smaller, but still great,
Constable to enrich art, if art be considered as a
treasure-house of masterpieces; but that Con-
stable did much more than Turner for Art con-
sidered in its historical development. Turner's
vast lake, with its bays and coves and crags and
castled shores, has no outlets ; but Constable's
narrow and sparkling stream flows past our feet
into the unknown forests and purple lowlands
which stretch far away before us. It is true that
too many of his followers, professing to search
reverently with him into the heart of Nature,
are only technicians refining upon his conven-
tions ; but this has been a phase of all reforms
in art.
Constable wrote in the Introduction to his
English Scenery :
In Art . . . there are two modes by which men
endeavour to attain the same end and seek distinction.
CONSTABLE 293
In the one the artist, intent only on the study of
departed excellence, or on what others have accom-
plished, becomes an imitator of their works or he
selects and combines their various beauties ; in the
other he seeks perfection at its primitive Source,
Nature. The one forms a style upon the study of
pictures, or the art alone ... the other by study
equally legitimately founded in art, but further pursued
in such a far more expansive field, soon finds for him-
self innumerable sources of study, hitherto unexplored,
fertile in beauty, and by attempting to display them for
the first time forms a style which is original ; thus
adding to the Art qualifications of Nature unknown
to it before.
The last sentence is excellently said. Generally
speaking, Constable's predecessors had shut their
eyes to the innumerable beauties of lit and
shaded and interfused local colour in Nature, and
had preferred a conventional brown foundation
on which to build their artificialities. Many
noble works were produced by this old formula,
which was sincere until the school of Constable
revealed a more excellent way ; but to-day it is
sterile and outworn.
In labelling Constable a realist, one must be
sure of one's meaning. There are realistic land-
scapes nowadays which are almost indistinguish-
294 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS
able from coloured photographs ; and although
these things are honourably hung in exhibitions,
they have nothing to do with art. In Constable's
works there is always a strong subjective element.
His choice of a natural scene was governed by
distinctly pictorial considerations. Unfortunately,
the newest landscape-schools have decided that
the well-rounded pictorial unity of a fine Con-
stable is almost as bad as the artificial composi-
tions of his predecessors, and consequently we
are often called to look at blue and green and
yellow squares and oblongs which appear to have
been cut with scissors haphazard out of large
canvases. But Constable, although he was an
artist, painted so as to be understood of the
people. His renderings of external things were
faithful ; but they were executed with so much
style and temperament that the natural objects
became artistic subjects. In the best sense, his
works are full of the worker. As truly as
Turner, though in a different fashion, he added
Man to Nature ; and surely great art knows no
other way.
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