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THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
^2$
"Ittational treasures
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
Uniform with this volume
THE LOUVRE
By E. E. Richards
Other volumes are in irrejmxalion
THE
NATIONAL GALLERY
BY
J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH, M.A.
AUTHOR OF " MEDITERRANEAN MOODS," ETC.
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
PRINTED BY
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
EDINBURGH
1912
N
1070
CONTENTS
I. THE FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
II. THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS .
III. THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
IV. THE DUTCH SCHOOL
V. THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
VI. THE SPANISH SCHOOL .
VII. THE FRENCH SCHOOL . . .
VIII. THE BRITISH SCHOOL .
INDEX
11
27
43
57
74
92
105
116
141
494
:t dept."
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The National Gallery
From a Drawing
Frontispiece
TO FACE
PAGE
Botticelli
. Madonna and Child
16
Leonardo da Vinci Our Lady of the Rocks .
17
Raphael
. Ansidei Madonna .
32
Bellini
. Doge Leonardo Loredano
33
Titian
. Bacchus and Ariadne
40
Veronese
. Consecration of St Nicholas
41
Correggio
. Madonna of the Basket .
48
Moroni
. Portrait of a Tailor .
49
Rembrandt
. An Old Lady .
56
Rembrandt
. Portrait of Himself .
51
De Hooch
. A Dutch Interior .
64
Frans Hal
s . A Man's Portrait .
65
Hobbema
. The Avenue .
72
Van Dyck
. Cornelius van der Geest .
73
Van Eyck
. Jan Arnolfini .
80
Rubens
. Chapeau de Poil
81
Gerard Da
vii) . A Canon and his Patrons
88
Rubens
. Judgment of Paris .
89
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Holbein .
TO FACE PAGE
. Duchess of Milan . . g6
Velazquez
. Philip IV.
97
Velazquez
. Venus and Cupid .
104
Goya
. Dona Isabel .
105
Diaz
. Sunny Days in the Forest
112
BoUDIN
. Harbour at Trouville
113
Hogarth .
. Marriage a la Mode3 Sc. 2
120
Reynolds
. Lord Heathfield
121
Gainsborough
. Mrs Siddons .
128
Lawrence
. Mrs Siddons .
129
Constable
. The Cornfield
136
Turner .
. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
137
10
THE FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
In 1831 some justification existed for Coleridge's
sweeping assertion that " the darkest despotisms
on the Continent have done more for the growth
and elevation of the fine arts than the English
government." Most of the great European
galleries — the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Prado
and almost all the galleries of Germany — had
their origin in the collections of amiable despots.
They were thrown open to the public by the
democratic governments of the nineteenth cen-
tury, less despotic perhaps, but unquestionably
less amiable so far as art was concerned.
The British National Gallery, like most typically
British institutions, owes its existence to private
enterprise rather than to the initiative of the
State. It is said that the idea originated with
George IV., but while it would be heartless to
rob that monarch of any title to the gratitude of
posterity, it seems probable that his claim to
ii
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
have been responsible for the foundation of the
National Gallery has little more basis in fact
than his reputed assertion that he was present
at the battle of Waterloo. The suggestion of
forming a National Collection of paintings had in
fact been made towards the end of the eighteenth
century. The times were propitious for such a
step. Reverence for authority in art was then an
unquestioned tradition, and all aesthetic dis-
courses taught that salvation was only to be
found in the cultivation of " the sublime." The
sublime, as exemplified in the works of the old
masters, was at that time however to be found
only in the houses of the great or in foreign
galleries. Those artists who could afford it,
such as Reynolds and Romney, went abroad to
begin, rather than to complete, their artistic
education. The rest, if they were fortunate,
might get a glimpse of antiquity in the gallery
of some noble collector. Thus the influence of
Van Dyck upon the formation of Gainsborough's
style is chiefly due to his study of the Flemish
master at Wilton House, the seat of the Earls of
Pembroke.
Notwithstanding the obvious need for a National
Collection which should rank with the great
12
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
galleries of the Continent, no action was taken
in the matter, until a fortunate chance gave the
Government its opportunity. One of the most
famous collectors of the eighteenth century was
John Julius Angerstein, a Russian who had
settled in England at the age of fifteen and,
beginning as an underwriter at Lloyd's, had
amassed a large fortune as a merchant and
banker. He was a generous patron of the arts
and had formed an important collection of
pictures under the guidance of Benjamin West
and Sir Thomas Lawrence. In 1823 Angerstein
died at the age of eighty-eight and directed in
his will that the pictures in his house in Pall
Mall should be sold. They numbered thirty-
eight and included works by most of the
great masters — Raphael, Correggio, Veronese,
Tintoretto, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van
Dyck, Claude, Poussin, Murillo. They formed in
fact an admirable nucleus for a National Collec-
tion, and a demand at once arose that the
Government should purchase them for that
purpose. Sir George Beaumont, the painter, was
keenly anxious that the opportunity should not
be lost, and while Lord Liverpool, then Prime
Minister, was debating the matter, he is reported
13
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
to have gone to him and said, "Buy this col-
lection of pictures for the nation and I will add
mine." He himself was the possessor of a notable
collection of Claudes, together with examples by
Rembrandt, Rubens and Canaletto. The oppor-
tunity was too tempting even for the most
rigidly economic statesman to refuse, and on
23rd March 1824 Lord Liverpool announced to
his colleagues that he had decided to purchase
Angerstein's collection. Sir George Beaumont
kept his word and added his own. The sacrifice
meant much to him, for he was passionately fond
of his pictures — in fact, he could not bring
himself to part with his favourite Claude, and
asked to be allowed to keep it in his own
possession until his death. A special grant of
£57,000 was voted for the purchase of the
Angerstein pictures — a sum which seems alto-
gether insignificant in comparison with the
amount which such a collection would fetch at
the present day.
It was certainly high time for England to
begin picture collecting if she was to secure a
fair share of the world's art. Already the national,
or more strictly speaking the royal, collections of
the chief countries of Europe had a start of a
14
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
century or two. The collection of the Russian
merchant in Pall Mall was, after all, a poor thing
when compared with those of the Louvre, the
Prado and the Belvedere. Even after consider-
able additions had been made, Ruskin called the
National Gallery "an European jest." But this
lateness of time at which England entered into
the race was not without its advantages. At any
rate the National Gallery began with a clean
slate. Had its formation been undertaken a
century earlier there would without doubt have
been an encumbering heritage of works collected
in an age when the history of art was little
known and second-rate painters were in fashion.
Many of the Continental galleries suffer from
such a damnosa hereditas. In 1824, however, the
day had gone by when Guido Reni was con-
sidered to rank with the world's greatest masters
and the works of the Quattrocento were despised
as "Gothic." The spread of the historical spirit
had revolutionised taste in art. Hence it was
possible to build up a collection representative of
the history of painting on more scientific lines
than the older galleries of the Continent, and
one which, unlike them, stands in no need
of judicious weeding. As regards opportunities of
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
purchase the time was highly favourable. Com-
petition was not keen and prices were low.
America and Germany had not seriously entered
the market as buyers. The decayed nobles and
impoverished convents of Italy were only too
ready to exchange their treasures for English
gold, and there was as yet no central Italian govern-
ment to forbid the sale of the national birthright.
Such good use did the directors make of their
opportunities that in 1888 Ruskin, withdrawing
his remark about the " European jest," pronounced
the National Gallery to be "without question
now the most important collection of paintings in
Europe for the purposes of the general student."
The nation having secured the Angerstein and
Beaumont pictures in 1824 had as yet nowhere
to put them. They were left, therefore, in
Angerstein's house in Pall Mall (occupying a
part of the site on which the Reform Club now
stands), and entrusted to the care of a modest
establishment, consisting of a housemaid, a door-
keeper and two curators, presided over by a
Keeper of the Gallery, to which post Mr Seguier,
a picture cleaner and restorer, was appointed.
The management was unmethodical and ill-
organised. Mr Seguier received a salary of
16
M VDONXA AND CHILD
Botticelli
Our Lady of the Rocks
Leonardo da I 'inci
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
£200 a year for the performance of a number of
more or less indeterminate duties, one of which
was " to be present occasionally in the gallery,"
and "a committee of six gentlemen," afterwards
increased in number and designated trustees, was
appointed to give him such further instructions
as circumstances might require. All responsibility
seems to have been left nicely in suspense be-
tween the Keeper and the Committee. No fund
was provided for the purchase of pictures, as
all future buying was to be left to the Treasury.
The outlook of a gallery whose purchases were
to be made by politicians advised by amateurs
was not promising. The guiding principle of the
Committee appears to have been a determina-
tion not to be rash. Their policy proved to be
" penny wise, pound foolish." Michael Angelo's
Taunton Madonna they might have secured
for £500 ; they offered £250 ; twenty years later
they bought it for £2000. The Garvagh Raphael,
for which they refused to bid more than £2000,
was subsequently acquired for five times that
amount. During the first twenty years of the
Gallery's existence, the golden age for buying
old masters, only twenty-five pictures were bought.
Donations and bequests brought the total of the
B 17
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
collection up to nearly two hundred, but the
stream of benefactions diminished as the market
value of the works of art increased.
But in spite of their determination to hold
to a safe course, the Keeper and the Committee
between them managed to steer the institution
into stormy waters. In 1845 a commonplace
German painting was bought as a Holbein. " The
veriest tyro," sneered Ruskin, "might have been
ashamed of such a purchase." At the same time
a drastic cleaning of the pictures provoked a loud
outcry that the collection had been ruined by
a too liberal application of soap and water. There-
upon the Committee appear to have come to the
conclusion that the best way to avoid mistaken
action was to cease from action altogether. This
policy was the most disastrous of all. It led to
the failure to take advantage of the most
magnificent opportunity the Gallery ever had —
or probably ever will have — the possibility of
purchasing in 1848, for what has been described
as an insignificant sum, the whole of the pi'iceless
Pitti Collection at Florence, with its sixteen
Titians, its fourteen Raphaels, its Rubenses, Fra
Bartolommeos, Andrea del Sartos and the rest.
By this time the Government had acquired
iS
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
some experience of the working of an art institu-
tion, and in 1853 a committee was appointed
by the House of Commons to inquire into the
general system of management and the relations
between the Gallery authorities and the Treasury.
The result was that the cumbersome system of
dual control was abolished and all responsibility
for the choice and purchase of pictures was
vested in a single individual, the Director. The
trustees were maintained as an advisory board,
with a view to forming an indirect channel of
communication with the Government and to
keeping up a connection between the institution
and the body of art lovers in the country. But
in all cases of difference of opinion between the
Director and the trustees, respecting the purchase
of pictures, the decision of the Director was to
be final. Sir Charles Eastlake, who had already
occupied the post of Keeper, was appointed
Director for a period of five years, at a salary of
£1000 a year. An annual grant of £10,000 was
provided for the purchase of pictures.
The fortunes of the Gallery now became
dependent to a large extent upon the personal
judgment and taste of the successive experts who
presided over it. On the whole the system worked
19
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
well, although inevitably it has had its critics.
Animadversions have been directed against a
certain lack of catholicity of taste on the part of
the directors, manifesting itself especially in an
excessive partiality for the works of the early
Italian schools, and a certain indifference to
everything that has been attempted or achieved
in painting abroad since the beginning of the
eighteenth century. This criticism would have
more weight if it did not ignore limitations of
time and money. With a grant of only a few
thousands a year it was impossible in a space
of ninety years to forma collection completely
representative of five centuries of European
painting. It was a fortunate prejudice, if prejudice
it can be called, which led the first directors
to build up the Gallery upon a broad and deep
foundation of the art of the Italian Renaissance.
During Sir Charles Eastlake's administration
the gaps in the Italian section were rapidly
filled up, one hundred and sixty-four pictures
being added in ten years, exclusive of the
Turner bequest. During the administration of his
successor, Sir William Boxall, the Dutch school
received an invaluable addition through the
acquisition of the Peel Collection, which was
20
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
purchased for £70,000 by the Government. By
one glaring blunder Sir William gave a striking
demonstration of the fallibility of the expert. In
1866 he bought the picture known as Christ
blessing IAttle Children (757) as a Rembrandt, and at
a Rembrandt price, £7000. It was not long before
the painting was discovered to be by a pupil
of Rembrandt, and apart from any question of
technique it is difficult to understand how a work
so lacking in the force and concentration of the
great Dutch master should have been accepted
as his without any hesitation. It is probably the
worst bargain that the nation ever made.
The present complexion of the Gallery is due
principally to Sir Frederic Burton, who held the
post of Director from 1874 to 1894. He was more
catholic in his taste than Sir Charles Eastlake ;
Italian purchases still preponderated, but other
schools received due recognition. His boldest
stroke was the purchase of two pictures from the
collection of the Duke of Marlborough, Raphael's
Ansidei Madonna and Van Dyck's Charles the First.
The sum paid for the former, £70,000, would hardly
be considered sensational in these days, when six-
figure prices are not unknown, but at that time
it was three times greater than had ever before
21
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
been paid for a single picture. The fact is, Sir
Frederic had a more exact knowledge of the
aesthetic than of the commercial value of painting,
and in the estimate which he made for the
Government he valued the two works at ,£1 1 5,000
and £31,500 respectively. "I remember once
hearing Mr Gladstone refer to this matter,"
Sir E. T. Cook relates. " His economic conscience
seemed to give him some qualms on the score of
the unprecedented price. But he took comfort
in the fact that, large as was the price actually
paid, the price asked by the owner, as also the
valuation of the Director, was very much larger.
e At any rate,' he said, with a smile, ' I saved the
taxpayers £45,000 on this Raphael, by nqt listening
to the advice of the Director of the Gallery.' "
On account of this purchase the annual grant
was suspended, and when renewed it was reduced
by half, to £5000.
When Sir Frederic Burton retired, in 1 894, Sir
Edward Poynter was appointed in his place by
Lord Rosebery, who took the opportunity of
remodelling the constitution of the Gallery.
He considerably circumscribed the powers of
the Director, practically reverting to the system
in force from 1824 to 1853, those years of
22
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
slow growth and lost opportunities. Sir Edward
Poynter was succeeded by the present Director,
Sir Charles Holroyd, in 1906.
The building in Trafalgar Square in which the
collection is now housed, designed by William
Wilkins, 11. A., was begun in 1832, and opened
to the public in 1838. Its appearance was subject
to adverse criticism from the very first, and
certainly it is lacking in the dignity which the
importance of its position and its contents
demands. The preposterous dome, which was
once inhabited by the students of the Royal
Academy, and the ludicrous "pepper-boxes"
flanking the building, serve no good purpose,
either useful or ornamental, and might with
advantage be removed or modified. Any serious
attempts to alter the facade were postponed
owing to the expectation that the Gallery would
be removed to a site farther away from the centre
of London, where the atmosphere was less smoky,
as the Parliamentary Committee appointed in
1 853 recommended ; but even after this proposal
was vetoed it was not intended that the present
structure should be left as it is. Various designs
have been submitted at different times embody-
ing proposed improvements, but these have all
23
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
come to nothing, and it is unlikely that any
change in the external features will take place
for some time to come.
At first the building in Trafalgar Square housed
the Royal Academy as well as the National
Gallery. In 1869 the Academy moved to
Burlington House, and five more rooms were
made available for the National Collection. The
number of English pictures however had so
increased, through the Vernon gift and the Turner
bequest, that the building was still too small to
contain the whole collection, and a new wing was
erected in 1876, from the design by E. M. Barry,
R.A. This addition enabled the English school,
which had hitherto been exhibited at South
Kensington, to be removed to Trafalgar Square,
and for the first time the whole collection was
united in a single building. Further enlarge-
ments have since taken place, the lighting and
decollation have been greatly improved, so that
"these melancholy and miserable rooms," as
Ruskin called them, now have an air of splendour
and dignity which is worthy of the mastei'pieces
on their walls.
In 1853 an elaborate inquiry was undertaken
as to the methods of the arrangement of the
24
FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION
pictures in the principal European galleries.
Many of the authorities admitted that they had
no other system than a general intention to
secure harmony of effect. The plan which was
adopted at the National Gallery was the satis-
factory one of hanging the pictures according to
schools in their proper historical sequence. The
only disadvantage of this scheme is that the
elementary principle of large pictures for large
rooms and small ones for small rooms is bound
to suffer. It also renders impossible that feature
found in some Continental galleries — a tribune,
or salon carrc, in which the choicest master-
pieces of the collection are hung side by side.
This concentration of the masterpieces of all
schools and periods in a small space has its
convenience for the tripper, whose idea is to
" do " the gallery in the minimum of time, but
the system has nothing else to recommend it ;
for, as Ruskin affirmed when its introduction into
the National Gallery was debated, "under such
circumstances pictures rather injure each other,"
and certainly every picture gains in interest and
significance when seen in conjunction with the
works of the same school which preceded and
followed it.
25
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
The only alteration in the annual income of
the Gallery has been its reduction from £10,000
to £5000. At the same time, since that reduction
was made the price of pictures of world impor-
tance has increased enormously. The continual
absorption of great works of art by national and
municipal galleries restricts the supply, while
the demand grows daily in almost geometrical
ratio as city bids against city and millionaire
against millionaire. The £5000 a year which
might have been adequate thirty or forty years
ago is now insufficient for the purchase of a single
first-class work of art. This, however, is not the
place to discuss the problems which beset the
further expansion of the Gallery. What it will
achieve in the future must depend largely on
that private generosity which has helped to make
its achievements so marvellous in the past.
26
II
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
The underlying assumption in Ruskin's statement
that the National Gallery is " without question
now the most important collection of paintings in
Europe for the purposes of the general student"
is that the general student purposes mainly to
study the art of the Italian Renaissance. From
the Spanish room he can obtain at best but a
partial view of the art of Spain ; from the French
collection he receives only suggestive hints and
whispers of the glory of French art in the
nineteenth century ; it is even questionable
whether it is possible to realise the greatness of
the English school of portraiture at Trafalgar
Square. But the outstanding feature of the
collection is the completeness with which the art
of Italy is represented, from its first stammerings
in the Byzantine dialect to the large majestic
utterance of its maturity. And in this extensive
period there has been a noteworthy concentration
27
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
upon that happy dawning time of the Renaissance,
when the world was seen with a kind of childlike
wonder, when gesture was fresh and unconvention-
alised and the but half-successful contest with
technical difficulties begot an exhilaration which
was lost in the later facility of execution.
The interests of the general student, however,
do not altogether coincide with those of the
general public. It must be frankly admitted that
the predominance of the Italian schools in the
Gallery is a little bewildering, and not always
quite welcome to the casual visitor. From those
who visit the Gallery inspired by a sense of duty
rather than expectant of delight it is not un-
common to hear disparaging references to the
monotony of "all those saints and martyrdoms
and crucifixions and things." From the heights of
connoisseurship it is easy to look down contemptu-
ously upon the tired Philistine's rather pathetic
confession of boredom, but it has its significance
for all that. It is undeniable that the centre of
human interest has shifted since the Middle Ages,
and consequently the subject-matter of the arts
has changed too. The Church, under whose
tutelage painting grew to maturity, made a
stupendous effort to realise its doctrine and
28
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
traditions visually through art. But much of
what was once of vital concern to the individual
has lost its reality, and therefore its interest, for
the modern mind. No one would be ashamed to
confess that he finds contemporary politics more
absorbing than the records of the diplomacy of
fifteenth-century Italian states. Why therefore
should anyone be condemned for finding a greater
interest in the art which portrays contemporary
life than for that which reflects a world and ideals
which are remote and unfamiliar ?
Necessarily a survey of the Italian schools must
prove wearisome to the spectator who looks at
painting merely for the interest of its subject-
matter. But the subject is merely the skeleton
of fact which it is the artist's business to clothe
with the living tissue of beauty. Beauty is the one
supreme interest in Italian painting, which no
revolutions of ideals or intellectual interests can
ever diminish. As the present Director of the
National Gallery, Sir Charles Holroyd, has re-
marked, " Whatever qualities other schools may
have, and their qualities are many and of the
highest interest, beauty is the prerogative of the
Italian school, and, since we have practically lost
all Greek painting, of that school only." In the
29
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
pictures in these rooms it is interesting to trace
the growing preoccupation of the painter with
beauty for its own sake and his persistent effort to
introduce it, if even at times by a kind of subter-
fuge, into the subjects which his ecclesiastical
patrons imposed upon him.
In the vestibule are collected those works of
the Trecento, the first brilliant period in the art
of the Italian peninsula, in which the national
genius is at work breathing life into the rigid
traditional formulas of Byzantine art. Necessarily
they are not numerous, for the Trecentisti were
painters of frescoes rather than of panel pictures,
but in point of numbers they compare favourably
with those in any gallery outside Florence.
Cimabue's Madonna (5&5) presides over this little
group in its sombre majesty. The picture has
suffered from time and restoration, the face in
particular having been damaged by the destruc-
tion of the surface painting, which has left the
greenish undertones exposed. The pose still con-
forms to the stiff, hieratic tradition, yet already
a tremor of life animates the figure, quivering
along the arm to the finger tips. Based partly
upon the conventional type of the Byzantine
ikon, partly upon sympathetic observation of the
3°
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
human living mother, the picture is full of dignity
and a certain archaic charm. Of Cimabue's greater
pupil Giotto the Gallery possesses no original
work, but his influence is apparent in many of the
works of this early school, particularly in the fine
fragment of fresco known as Two Apostles (276),
a study of two mournfully expressive heads bowed
in hopeless grief. The Transfiguration (1330), the
work of Giotto's great Siennese contemporary,
Duccio di Buoninsegna, again illustrates the
transition from a petrified tradition to an art
founded upon the observation of life. Here we
see the stiff figures of the ancient shrines assuming
a certain freedom and expressiveness of pose, and
beginning to group themselves together in a
natural scene. The Byzantine gold background
is combined with a rudimentary attempt at actual
scenery in the rocky mount.
A century after Giotto, Masaccio reincarnated
the genius of the early master in an age more
propitious for the arts. The absence of any work
from the hand of this great painter constitutes
the most serious gap in the whole collection — a
gap which it will be extremely difficult ever to fill,
as practically the whole of his work is confined to
the two churches in Florence for which it was
3i
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
originally executed. Berlin, however, has man-
aged to secure three examples, and there are still
three or four in the hands of private owners, so
that there is still a possibility of the gap being
filled.
Masaccio was not the sole renovator of art at
the beginning of the Quattrocento, for he
numbered among his contemporaries Fra Angelico,
Paulo Uccello and Fra Filippo Lippi. The Gallery
contains one excellent specimen of Fra Angelico's
smaller work, Christ surrounded by Angels, Patri-
archs, Saints and Martyrs (663), a predella detached
from the altar which it adorned in the convent of
San Domenico at Fiesole and sold by the monks
in the days before the Italian government put a
stop to such proceedings. The picture is a vision
of the heavenly host, radiant as a rainbow, sur-
rounding the risen Christ, who is in a literal sense
the source of light. The delicate miniature-like
drawing shows the influence of an early training
in illuminating manuscripts, while the serenity
of all the faces reveals the temperament of the
painter, whose ruling sentiment in art as in life
appears to have been, " God's in his heaven — all's
right with the world."
A whole world of emotion separates this
32
Ansidei Maih inn \
Raphael
Dock Leonardo Lorkndano
Bellini
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
glimpse of the departing mediaeval vision from
the contemporary work of Uccello, known as The
Battle of Sunt' Egidio (583). It is remarkable as
being the first Italian work in the Gallery con-
taining actual portraits and the earliest attempt
at a representation of a contemporary event. In
spite of a certain stiffness, which gives the effect
of stuffed figures arrested in the midst of their
mechanical movements, the picture conveys a real
sensation of the crowd and shock and resonance
of battle. Very effective in the midst of the
tumult is the repose of the young helmet-bearer,
to whose beautiful medallion-like head, by the
way, Swinburne in his younger days is said to
have borne an extraordinary likeness. A strong
feeling for decoration is apparent everywhere —
in the long raking lines of the lances (inevitably
suggesting a comparison with Las Lanzas of
Velazquez), in the gaily streaming pennons, in the
captain's marvellous headdress of gold and purple
damask, and in the burnished globes of fruit and
the wild blossoms on the hedge, which form such
a happy and unexpected incident in the scene.
But even greater than Uccello's fondness for
decorative effect was his passion for perspective.
The science had then all the fascination of a new
c 33
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
discovery, and the painter could not deny himself
the pleasure of displaying his newly acquired skill,
as in the foreshortening of the rather uncon-
vincing prostrate warrior in the foreground, and
the arrangement of the broken lances on the
ground designed to show the mathematically con-
verging lines.
The new spirit which inspired Uccello — delight
in science and in the naturalistic reproduction
of objects — worked powerfully in the two brothers
Pollaiuolo, represented here by the Martyrdom of
St Sebastian (292). It is obvious that the painters
were not particularly interested in the spiritual
significance of the subject. The saint is elevated
to the top of the picture so as to give greater
scope for the display of the fine figures of the
archers in the foreground, who form the real sub-
ject. Antonio Pollaiuolo was the first painter
seriously to investigate the science of anatomy,
and he is said to have dissected many bodies in
the pursuit of this study. The result of his labours
is manifest in the beautiful rendering of the play
of muscle in the arms and legs of the archers as
they stoop and strain to pull back the cords of the
crossbows. A landscape of subtly harmonised green
tones leads the eye skilfully back to the remote
34
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
horizon. Thus by a division of interest between
the muscular figures in the foreground and the
delicate beauty of the distant scene, the spectator
is induced to ignore that which for the ecclesi-
astical patron who ordered it was the essence of
the picture, the martyrdom of the saint.
Of Botticelli it has been said that we have no
alternative but to worship or abhor him. It is
certainly a fact that his fame has been subject to
remarkable vicissitudes. In his own day his renown
stood high — his name alone was mentioned by
Leonardo in his treatise on painting ; then he
appears to have lapsed into oblivion until, in com-
paratively recent times, Ruskin, Rossetti and Pater
began to sound his praises with all the enthusiasm
of a new discovery. It is matter for congratula-
tion, therefore, that the National Gallery possesses
at least four undoubted works by his hand, to-
gether with some others more properly ascribed
to his school. Even those who are unresponsive to
the peculiar fascination of this painter cannot
but admire the Head of a Young Man (6L26), un-
attractive in colour, but in drawing how expressive.
The Mars and Venus (915), which by the way
probably has nothing to do with Mars or Venus at
all, being an illustration of quite another legend,
35
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
is full of the inspiration of the early Renaissance ;
the drawing is somewhat harsh and angular, but
it must be remembered that the picture origin-
ally decorated a space over a door in the Medici
Palace, a fact which probably had an influence on
the design. The Nativity of Christ (1034), painted
towards the close of his life, in a strain of mysticism
and devotion, illustrates in the draperies of the
floating angels the artist's marvellous suggestion
of movement by means of the expressiveness of
his line. But it is in the tondo of the Madonna and
Child (275) that the individuality of Botticelli's
well-known types is most marked. Richter, largely
on account of the Child, whom he finds " positively
repulsive," is disposed to regard the work as only
a school piece, but the weight of authority is
against him. Certainly it seems incredible that any
other hand than Botticelli's could have invested
the Madonna with that haunting look of wistful-
ness, almost of discontent, the like of which we
meet in the work of no other painter. For Botti-
celli seems to have united a sympathy with the
Christian ideal with a i*egretful yearning for the
old pagan past, and he impressed this air of
divided allegiance even upon the Blessed Virgin.
" He painted Madonnas," said Pater, " but they
36
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
shrink from the pressure of the divine Child, and
plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer,
lower humanity." Such a Madonna he has painted
here, awed by the "intolerable honour" that has
come to her. And this perhaps is the reason why
these " peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to
no acknowledged type of beauty, attract you more
and more, aud often come back to you when the
Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of Fra Angelico
are forgotten."
The one picture which the Gallery possesses
by Leonardo da Vinci, Our Lady of the Rocks (1093),
has been the cause of some contention, as an
almost identical work by the same painter exists
in the Louvre. The authenticity of the British
version has been disputed by some critics, but the
probability is that both are the original works of
the master. Here again time has proved to be the
enemy rather than the ally of the painter. The
ivory-black which formed the foundation of the
painting has come through, throwing the whole
picture, with the exception of the yellowish high
lights, into a profound shadow. Thelandscape from
which the picture takes its title is a curious fast-
ness of fantastic rocks, and has the effect of in-
vesting the scene with a mysterious solemnity,
37
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
withdrawing it to a remote region which we
scarcely recognise as belonging to this familiar
earth. The kneeling Virgin rests one hand on the
shoulder of the little John the Baptist, while an
angel supports the infant Christ. The wonder of
the picture is the exquisitely modelled head of
the Virgin, with that indefinable expression char-
acteristic of Leonardo's type of woman. It is
not an actual smile, but rather a benign light
upon the face, which seems to proceed from the
possession of an ancient and secret wisdom.
The name of Michael Angelo, " the pupil of
nobody, the heir of everybody," stands in the list
of the Gallery's painters, but unfortunately only
a couple of fragmentary works answer to it, and
even these have not passed unchallenged as
genuine works. Over the attribution of The En-
tombment of Christ (790) the critics are more than
usually at variance. "There is no doubt what-
ever," says Sir Edward Poynter, "that this
picture is the work of the great master." But
according to J. A. Symonds " it is painful to
believe that at any period of his life Michael
Angelo could have produced a composition so
discordant, so unsatisfactory in some anatomical
details, so feelingless and ugly." The present
38
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
Director of the Gallery gives his verdict that " it
is probably a much-repaired original that was
merely begun by the master, who left it in the
condition of outline and wash that we see in the
three figures of women and the landscape." And
similarly in the case of The Madonna and Child
with Angels (809) the design has the beauty and
grandeur of Michael Angelo himself, while the
finish of the hands and feet, and the hatchings
of the drapery, are probably the work of a lesser
hand.
The Umbrian school, less intellectual but
possibly more graceful than the Florentine, is
seen to better advantage in the National Gallery
than anywhere else except in Umbria's chief
city, Perugia. The aloofness characteristic of
Piero deila Francesca's work, preventing him
from being definitely placed within the four
corners of any school, will be noticed in his two
wonderful pictures, The Nativity of our Lord (908)
and The Baptism oj Christ in the River Jordan
(()().")). The Nativityhas the spell of an impersonal,
almost of an unemotional, art, distantly suggestive
of that of Velasquez, and also communicating that
sense of fresh air special to the great Spaniard.
The picture is wholly free from the narrow
39
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
ecclesiasticism which oppresses us in many
renderings of religious subjects; it has the fresh-
ness of an original conception of a singularly
poetic mind. In all the Gallery there is no more
beautiful group than that of the five angels, with
their grave sweet faces, their large resonant lutes,
their sober grey-green draperies, rhythmically
hymning the new-born Child, while the girlish
mother, who has tenderly spread the skirt of her
robe on the rough ground for the infant to lie on,
kneels in silent adoration.
In Perugino is concentrated all the sweetness,
sometimes a rather cloying sweetness, of Umbrian
art. His Virgin and Child with Michael and Raphael
(288) is redeemed from a too soft and dainty
beauty by an extraordinarily fine feeling of space
which gives the composition placidity and dignity.
Everything is hushed and soothing — the air still
and soundless, the figures reposeful, the warrior
archangel, not Milton's Michael " with hostile
brow and visage all inflamed," is clothed with
serenity rather than strength.
All that Perugino attempted of lucidity and
grace Raphael achieved. First of all his works in
the Gallery comes the Ansidei Madonna (1171),
"quite the loveliest Raphael in the world" was
40
Bacchus \\ t> Ariadne
Tit in i i
Photograph : Hanfstaengl
Consecration of St. Nicholas
Veronese
THE CENTRAL ITALIAN SCHOOLS
Ruskin's verdict after one of his last visits to the
Gallery. It shares the distinction with Holbein's
Christina of Denmark of being the most costly
picture in the collection, the price — the curious
in such matters may be interested to learn —
working out at more than £14 the square inch.
The Madonna and Child are less interesting
than the figures of the attendant saints— on the
left St John the Baptist, clad in rough camel-
skin, bearing a crystal cross, rapt in adoration,
on the right St Nicholas of Bari, vested in
jewelled cope, absorbed in the reading of a book
— the two enduring and conflicting types of the
Christian saint, the one devotional, ecstatic, con-
templative, the other active, practical, scholarly.
In the distance are seen glimpses of a faultless
little Apennine landscape. From the luminous
pale blue sky proceeds a crystalline light which
irradiates all the cool pearly atmosphere in the
arched portico and gives a telling value to the
sparely used touches of colour in the bishop's
jewels, the illumiuated missal on the knee of the
Virgin, the coral chaplets hanging down on either
side of the throne. The seraphic grace of the
Umbrian school receives here its complete ex-
pression ; further than this it could not go. And
4i
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therefore, in the late Arthur Strong's view, " the
Ansidei Madonna is Raphael's farewell effort, as
it were, in a type which he was on the point of
discarding as too narrow and too stiff for the
growing impulse of his genius."
A more mature woi-k of the master's is the
portrait of Pope Julius II. (27). The colour scheme
is rich but simple, a harmony of red, green and
white. The finely modelled head is profoundly
expressive, suggestive of a warrior, as the Pope
indeed was, who looks back with a stern joy upon
the record of his warfare. " Raphael has caught
the momentary repose of a restless and passionate
sjDirit," wrote Dr Mandell Creighton, "and has
shown all the grace and beauty which are to be
found in the sense of power repressed and power
at rest. Seated in an arm-chair, with head bent
downward, the Pope is in deep thought. His
furrowed brow and his deep-sunk eyes tell of
energy and decision. The long-drawn corners of
his mouth betoken constant dealings with the
world."
42
Ill
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
The splendour of the National Collection is no-
where more apparent than in the pictures of the
Venetian school. They are as remarkable for their
high level of excellence as for their representative
character. Of course there are the well-nigh
inevitable omissions. Most of all we regret the
absence of anything from Giorgione's golden
brush save one small silver-grey knight in armour
(269), a study for the great altarpiece at Castel-
franco, but as only about a score of his undisputed
works are in existence we can scarcely repine.
There is nothing to represent the pleasure-loving
Carpaccio, whose pageant-pictures are one of the
chief glories of the Accademia at Venice ; the
three examples of Tintoretto are only enough
to make us wish for more ; and from the small
designs of Tiepolo we can but guess at the force
and splendour, melodramatic though it be, of the
last of the Venetians. But for these deficiencies
43
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
there are memorable compensations. The little
collection of Crivelli's curiously felicitous work
is unrivalled for quality and completeness ; the
delightful series of Giovanni Bellini, every one
a masterpiece, is another purple patch ; the
examples of Titian and Veronese, if not numer-
ous, are adequate ; and Canaletto, the painter of
Venice itself, is seen here in his happiest mood.
The archaistic methods of Crivelli, who though
he survived till the close of the fifteenth century
persisted in adhering to the fashion of its begin-
ning, are very evident in the several panels which
are built up into a large and imposing altarpiece
(788). The massive jewels and ornaments stand
out in high relief like bosses, and the cord upon
which the solid keys of St Peter depend is an
actual piece of string hanging quite free from the
surface. There was a certain affectation in this
adherence to out-of-date methods, for Crivelli was
quite alive to all the innovations of his con-
temporaries and could, if he wished it, be as
naturalistic as any of them — particularly in his
representation of fruit and vegetables, for which
he had a veritable passion. He loved to pile all
the produce of the market garden about the
thrones of his Madonnas, giving special promi-
44
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
nence to his favourite vegetable, the cucumber.
The Annunciation (739), an exquisite and curious
composition, showing simultaneously the interior
of the Virgin's room and the street without,
exhibits the painter's almost Dutch delight in
depicting intimate domestic appointments. It
would seem that the picture had been painted
not all to illustrate the Annunciation, but
expressly for the sake of the profusion of
decorative detail — the rich harmonies of the
Eastern rugs, the elaboi-ate arabesques of the
cornice and pilasters, the iridescent peacock, the
trim little bed with its green bedspread and three
embroidered pillows, the careful graining of the
woodwork behind, and the candlesticks, dishes
and pickle-jars all in a row on the shelf above.
" What are we to think of this painter? " asks Sir
Charles Holroyd. "Was he always quite serious,
or had he sometimes a smile on his face as he
worked? he is so skilful in some things, and
yet so childlike in others, we cannot quite tell
how to take him."
Passing to Giovanni Bellini, we find it difficult
to realise that this painter was born in the same
year as Crivelli, so much more modern is his
method and spirit. His early work, Christ's Agony
45
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in the Garden (726) betrays the same profound
religious emotion as his Pieta at Milan, beneath
which he inscribed a line telling how he worked
in tears and anguish for the sorrows of his suffer-
ing Lord. It is interesting to note the intro-
duction of the modern feeling for landscape into
this picture. The earlier Italian landscape had
been a dull convention, untouched by any reflec-
tion of human emotion. Bellini however aims at
impressing upon it his own personal mood,
planning the effect of the lurid twilight sky, the
long sombre hill, the bleak plain, to enhance the
sense of foreboding tragedy. Landscape is the
predominant interest in The Death of St Peter
Martyr (812), but here in accordance with the new
spirit that was coming over Venetian art, the
austerity of his earlier work is melted in a
sensuous softness and glow. The Dominican
general may be murdered in the foreground,
but this incident must on no account be allowed
to disturb the exquisite serenity of the peaceful
woodland scene, glowing in the mellow light of
the afternoon sun — for the Venetians are now
demanding on their walls neither devotion nor
theology, but just beautiful colour. "You see in a
moment the main characteristic of the school,"
46
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
says Ruskin, commenting on this picture, "that
it mattered not in the least to John, and that he
doesn't expect it to matter to you, whether people
are martyred or not, so long as one can make a
pretty grey of their gown, and a nice white of
their sleeves, and infinite decoration of forest
leaves behind, and a divine picture at last out of
all." The Doge Leonardo Lorcdano (189), painted
when the artist was nearly eighty, is one of the
great portraits of the world. Beautiful as a piece
of decoration, with the brilliant effect of the
g;nd and white brocaded mantle against a glow-
ing azure background, the picture conquers by
its intense concentration of personality. Did ever
the spirit of a man receive more vivid concrete
expression than in the face of this astute ruler ?
— "fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable, im-
placable— every word a fate." The Virgin and
Child (280) is an excellent example of the Venetian
type of the Madonna, neither intellectual and
contemplative, as in Florence, nor sweet and
girlish, as in Umbria, but serene, confident,
dignified, the eternal mother, with a neck set
firm as a column — " Turris eburnea " rather than
" Rosa Mystica."
If the Gallery had included one of Giorgione's
47
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representative works we should have seen a
perfect embodiment of the ripened spirit of the
Renaissance. After he had charmed the Venetians
with his peculiar mellow beauty, other artists
were obliged to adopt his method, treating the
subject without much care for the elucidation of
its actual meaning, but for the sake of evoking
a pleasurable mood and producing a richly
coloured surface. One of the most successful of
these popularisers was Vincenzo Catena. " Upon
hearing the title of one of Catena's works in the
National Gallery," writes Mr Berenson, "A Warrior
adoring the Infant Christ (234), who could imagine
what a treat the picture had in store for him ? It
is a fragrant summer landscape enjoyed by a few
quiet people, one of whom, in armour, with the
glamour of the Orient about him, kneels at the
Virgin's feet, while a romantic young page holds
his horse's bridle. I mention this picture in
particular because it is so good an instance of the
Giorgionesque way of treating a subject ; not for
the story, nor for the display of skill, nor for the
obvious feeling, but for the lovely landscape, for
the effects of light and colour, and for the sweet-
ness of human relations." Catena's other picture,
St Jerome in his Study (69i), though at first sight
48
Maim >n \ a ok the Baske i
' 'orreggio
Portrait of a Tailor
Moroni
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
of less obvious charm, shows the same sort of
intention, the evocation by means of soft colour
and simplified design of a mood of peacefulness
and contentment. Again the subject, the theo-
logical labours of the saint, matters little ; it is
the atmosphere that counts, the brightness of the
mountain air, the serenity of the landscape seen
through the open window, the spaciousness of
the bare clean room — and what a room for clear
thinking !
Titian began working upon the same vein that
Giorgione had opened out, but in time, while
retaining the joyousness of the early Renaissance
spirit, he developed a consciousness of the am-
plitude and dignity of life, which the young
Giorgione, dying prematurely at the age of thirty-
two, never attained. The Gallery possesses six of
the finest works of Titian — all too few to enable
us to gauge the capacity of that untiring hand
and brain which laboured through nearly a whole
century — but though " others may be here in
force, Titian is on his throne." And that throne
is the Bacchus and Ariadne (35), according to Sir
Edward Poynter " in its combination of all the
qualities which go to make a great work of art,
possibly the finest picture in the world." The
D 49
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scene represents Ariadne by the seashore,
deserted by her lover Theseus, when suddenly
Bacchus with his rout of revellers dashes up and,
enamoured of her beauty, leaps from his leopard-
drawn car to make her his bride. It is impossible
in words to give any broken echo of this paean of
the joy and exuberance of living. Some hint of
the careful thought which for three years the
painter gave to this work is conveyed by Sir
Joshua Reynolds' sober analysis of a single
passage, the red scarf of Ariadne. " The figure of
Ariadne is separated from the great group, and is
dressed in blue, which, added to the colour of the
sea, makes that quantity of cold colour which
Titian thought necessary for the support and
brilliancy of the great group ; which group is
composed, with very little exception, entirely of
mellow colours. But as in this case the picture
would be divided into two distinct parts, one half
cold and the other warm, it was necessary to
carry some of the mellow colours of the great
group into the cold part of the picture, and a part
of the cold into the great group ; accordingly,
Titian gave Ariadne a red scarf, and to one of
the Bacchantes a little blue drapery." All of which
goes to prove that the problem of knowing when
50
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
to put a patch of red into a picture and when a
blue one is less easy of solution than it would
appear !
The only example in the Gallery of Titian's
portraiture is the recently acquired Portrait of
Ariosto (1944) — the title is probably a misnomer
— painted in his earlier manner. The face shows
something of that disillusion and scepticism
which the Renaissance, with all its noble rapture,
brought to the heart of man. The suggestion of
pride and disdain is marvellously accentuated by
the grand gesture of the arm. The whole cos-
tume is reduced to one magnificent quilted sleeve,
which shows as clearly as any piece of painting by
Velasquez what effect of splendour and voluptu-
ousness may be achieved without going beyond
the range of the silvery tones of grey and black.
Paul Veronese is magnificently represented by
The Family of Darius (2.94), the greatest historical
painting of the collection. Like Shakespeare,
Veronese recks little of historical propriety and
boldly reconstructs this scene of Greek history
according to the pattern of the life of Venice
in his own day, "getting always vital truth out
of the vital present." The handling of so great a
mass of material — the kneeling princesses in the
5i
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Venetian costumes of the period, the group of
generals, the attendant soldiers and servants, dog,
monkey and all, the whole framed in an elaborate
architectural setting — presented almost insuper-
able difficulties of composition ; and yet here
there is no painful sense of effort, no trace of
second thoughts, it is all executed with a superb
ease, directness and certainty, recalling as Ruskin
has said "the movements of the finest fencer."
The principal figures were portraits of the Pisani
family, at whose villa the painter had been
staying. He left the picture behind him saying
that it would defray the expenses of his enter-
tainment. The family let three centuries elapse
before they realised their profit on the transaction,
selling the picture at last in 1857 to the National
Gallery for upwards of £13,000. The four allegor-
ical pictures known as Unfaithfulness, Scorn,
Respect and Happy Union (1318, 1324-1326) were
originally designed for the decoration of a ceiling,
a fact which the eye must allow for when viewing
them in their upright position. Equally decorative
is the figure in the Vision of Saint Helena (1041),
beautiful in its pearl and silver harmonies and
reposeful as a piece of antique Greek sculpture.
Of Tintoretto, the last of the great Venetian
52
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
triumvirate, we have but an insufficient glimpse
in the three of his works which the Gallery
possesses. The Origin of the Milky Way (1314), a
charming illustration of a classic myth, scarcely
affords us an example of that poetry of chiaroscuro
which Tintoretto brought to perfection, while it
displays his determination at all costs to astonish
and to be original.
The " Correggiosity of Correggio," a painter
working outside the Venetian sphere of influence,
is seen in its most fascinating phase in The
Education of Cupid (10), one of the two pictures
which Ruskin said he would last part with out of
the Gallery, the other being Titian's Bacchus and
Ariadne. It is an entirely flawless piece of flesh
painting, beside which " the best of Titian and
the best of Rubens would look oily and yellow."
The only other work in the Gallery which can
challenge comparison with it in this respect is
the Venus of Velasquez, and even that work
seems more like the prose of a scientific statement
after Correggio's lyric poetry of light and form.
The J'irgin of the Basket (23) is a marvellous
little tour de jorce, which reminds us of the
remark of Reynolds, "If I had not seen it
done by Correggio, I should have taken it to
S3
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
be impossible." The subject which enthralled
painters all through the Middle Ages has now
finally escaped from the dominion of the Church.
Here we have just a beautiful, smiling mother
playing sweet games of love with her wayward
boy — no more and no less,
Two portrait painters of exceptional talent,
who have only just missed a place in the very
first rank, Moretto and Moroni, are here seen at
their best. With subtle technical skill and
sympathetic insight they portray the dignity
and refinement of the Italian noble of the later
Renaissance — at a period, be it noted, when the
Spaniards who now dominated the peninsula
had set the fashion for black in dress, in place
of the gay colours of a happier age. Moroni is
perhaps more at his ease when painting less
distinguished sitters. His portraits of a tailor
(697), attentive and business-like, and of a lawyer,
alert and combative (742), have that special
quality which makes what we call a "speaking
likeness."
Happily Venetian painting was an unconscion-
ably long time in dying, and the eighteenth
century produced some painters who, if they
lacked the vast imagination of their predecessors,
54
THE NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOLS
were nevertheless very competent workmen in
oils. Canaletto and Guardi painted as a fitting
epilogue to the school a portrait of the city
itself. What a sober and literal portrait it is
may be seen from A View on the Grand Canal
(l63). The features of the buildings are re-
corded as accurately as in an architect's elevation
— every brick is accounted for, yet, as Ruskin
said, " What more there is in Venice than brick
and stone — what there is of mystery and death,
and memory and beauty — what there is to be
learnt and lamented, to be loved or wept — we
look for to Canaletto in vain." Canaletto more-
over has been somewhat sharply taken to task
for not setting his canvases aglow with all those
ensanguined atmospheric enchantments which
the northerner, taught by Turner, expects to
await him on every canal. But Venice does not
always show like a vision in the Apocalypse, and
the fact that Canaletto has chosen to render that
delicate greyness, born of the sea mists, which so
often veils the city on the lagoons, docs not argue
any insensibility to the beauty of atmosphere, but
rather the reverse. In his View of Venice (127)
showing the Scuola della Carita (now the
Academy of Arts), the buildings, as structurally
55
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
solid as any buildings ever painted, are visibly
swathed in atmosphere. This picture is more
than a photographic presentment — it gives us
the sense of overhearing the life of the city, the
quiet, unemotional, workaday life that is lived
year in and year out behind the scenes of that
amazing piece of stage decor which is Venice.
Guardi was always ready to compromise truth
for the sake of telling effects. His Church of
S. Maria del/a Salute (2098) looks unsubstantial
after Canaletto's enduring stonework, and his
desire to record a more instantaneous impression
than that of his master led him to fret his picture
with teasing little flecks of white. He had the
modern eye, if not quite the modern manner,
and was perhaps the first to occupy himself with
that cult of the picturesque which has spread
like a blight over so much of modern art. He
hunted diligently for "bits of old Venice," one
of which he has snapshotted so successfully
in his View through an Archway (1054).
56
A\ Old Lady
Rembrandt
^*J
M
Portrait of Himself
Rembrandt
IV
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
"A serious student of art," says Mr Berenson,
" will scarcely think of putting many of even the
highest achievements of the Italians, considered
purely as technique, beside the works of the
great Dutchmen." For the Dutch masters of
the seventeenth century, with their sure grasp
of realities, their feeling for the humorous and
the pathetic in the scenes of familiar life, and
above all their tradition of sound craftsmanship,
the English amateur of painting of the old school
invariably entertained a profound respect. He
collected their works with assiduity, and to-day
the finest examples of Dutch art in England are
probably still to be found, not in public galleries,
but in collections formed by connoisseurs in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From one
such collection the Dutch pictures at the National
Gallery are principally drawn. Sir Bobert Peel
is chiefly known to fame as the repealer of the
57
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
Corn Laws, but he has a second title to the
remembrance of posterity as a picture collector.
The Peel Collection was offered to the Govern-
ment in 1871, and purchased for the very
moderate sum of £70,000 — just the same amount
as was paid a few years later for the Raphael
Madonna from the Blenheim Collection.
Although Sir William Gregory, one of the
trustees of the Gallery, in proposing the vote for
the special grant in the House of Commons, said
that " it was gratifying to see that the taste of
the amateur was on a par with the sagacity of
the minister," it can scarcely be claimed for Sir
Robert that his connoisseurship was of the
highest order. But if he lacked an expert's
knowledge himself, he possessed the next best
thing to it — the faculty of availing himself of the
knowledge of others. He was accustomed to
employ expert agents and to allow them a liberal
discretion. Moreover in forming his collection
he laid down the soundest principle that a
collector could adopt. In reference to a com-
mission for the purchase of a certain picture one
of his agents wrote, " He said that he was willing
to give a good price, if a fine picture ; and if it
were not, he would not have it at any price."
58
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
Thanks to his determination to buy only the
best and to his scrupulousness in weeding out
inferior examples, his collection reached an
exceptionally high level of excellence — according
to Sir William Armstrong it was " the finest
cabinet of Dutch pictures ever collected by an
amateur."
Of the seventy-eight paintings which were
thus acquired by the nation, fifty-five belonged to
the Dutch school. This was a fortunate circum-
stance, for it did something to redress the
balance between the art of the North and the
South as represented in the Gallery. Sir
Charles Eastlake's policy of concentrating on
the fifteenth and sixteenth century Italians had
involved a certain neglect of the great Dutch-
men. The authorities moreover had felt no
special need for efforts in this direction, as it was
generally believed that a number of the mastei*-
pieces of Dutch art in the hands of private
owners would ultimately find their way into the
National Collection by donation and bequest — an
optimistic anticipation which has not yet been
realised.
The Peel Collection included but a single
Rembrandt, but as it happened Rembrandt was
59
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the one Dutch painter who was already fairly
well represented in the Gallery. Perhaps none
of the seventeen of his works seen here shows
the master in what has been called his Shake-
spearean mood ; but the two small pictures which
formed part of the original Angerstein Collection,
The Woman taken in Adultery (45) and The
Adoration of the Shepherds (47), combine a marvel-
lous technical dexterity with great imaginative
power. The Bible presents to the painter
a literature singularly rich in those passages
which concentrate emotion in a single memorable
image or incident, and better than any other
painter Rembrandt knew how to express the
significance of these fateful moments in the
terms of a pictorial statement. The Woman taken
in Adultery admirably illustrates his practice of
arranging the contrast of light and shade so as
to give the fullest force to the dramatic intensity
of the scene. The background of the Temple
is full of that magic mystery of gloom in which
Rembrandt's imagination delighted — a dim crowd
of worshippers, vast columns and a glittering
high altar towering up with a vague suggestion
of Oriental magnificence. Amidst the surround-
ing darkness the principal actors in the drama
60
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
stand out in the keen emphasis of a shaft of light.
The eye is first attracted to the kneeling woman
dressed in white, who is the most strongly lighted
of the group, next to the figure of Christ, and
then passes on to Peter, the Pharisees and the
soldiers. Although the scale of the figures is
reduced almost to that of a miniature, the
characterisation of each is pi'ecise and eloquent
— Christ serene and understanding, Peter in-
tently anxious to be just, the accusing Pharisee
cunningly seeking to inveigle the Master, the
soldier grasping the woman's skirt, stolid and
impassive, the leering old villain immediately on
his left, heartlessly relishing the piquancy of the
scandal, and the two Pharisees in the foreground,
the one with illumined face gravely appraising
the verdict, the other with face averted expressing
in his very pose the consciousness of his own
self-righteousness. The companion picture, The
Adoration of the Shepherds (47), is, in the words
of Mr Arthur Strong, " A rendering of the scene
such as no other man could have given. The
dim light, the squalor of the closely huddled
peasants, who speak in whispers for fear of
awaking the child, the pervading atmosphere
of hopeless poverty — all this shows how pro-
61
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foundly Rembrandt must have pondered the real
nature and beginnings of that Gospel which the
common people heard gladly. The great writer
of our day, who claimed that he alone in his
century had understood Jesus and St Francis,
said : J'ai un vif gout pour les pauvres. Rem-
brandt might have said the same."
The dramatic note sounded in both these
pictures is equally present in the portraits.
Here the drama is inward and spiritual — the
story of the adventures of the soul. In the two
portraits of himself he has painted his own
autobiography. In the first (672) we see him,
with an expression of self-reliance and keen
observant glance, at that critical moment of
a man's career when, having surrendered the
irresponsible ambitions of youth, he first begins
to see life steadily and whole, and to measure
its problems and the limitations of its possibilities.
In the second (221) he has painted the history
of the following thirty years of his life. Though
battered by time, the face is essentially the
same — that of a man who is at the same time a
penetrating reader of life and an eager actor in
it. The problems are still unresolved, but age
has brought, together with disappointment and
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THE DUTCH SCHOOL
disillusion, a certain temper of acceptance, and
we feel that the man who has drunk so deeply
of life is able at the end of the feast to pronounce
its flavour to be, on the whole, good. " In
manner," says Sir William Armstrong, "it is
amazingly free, irresponsible, and what in any-
one but a stupendous master we should call
careless. It looks as if he had taken up the
first dirty palette on which he could lay his
hands, and set himself to the making of a pic-
ture with no further thought. To those who put
signs of mastery above all other qualities, it is
one of the most attractive pictures in the whole
Gallery."
In the remaining portraits may be traced
Rembrandt's growing absorption in the rendering
of character. The detail of his early work — the
delight in the hardness of metal, in the fragility
of linen and lace — passes out of the picture ; the
background is emptied of incident, and even
colour itself is all but suppressed, as though
too insignificant an accident in the momentous
theme he is alone concerned with — the conflict
of the soul with fate. Human life is seen against
the background of the shadows of destiny.
While his grasp of reality grows firmer, his sense
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of the mystery which envelops it becomes more
acute. For the true realist must of necessity be
a mystic, and in this sense Rembrandt was the
greatest of realists.
Though essentially a man of his own people
and his own time — as every man who is for all
peoples and for all time always has been —
Rembrandt is separated by an impassable gulf
from all other painters of the Dutch school.
Realists they were to a man, but realists for
whom the most real thing about an object was
its visible surface. They lacked the penetrating
insight of Rembrandt, which pierced through the
outer covering to the romance and poetry that
is inwoven with the stuff of common life. The
one among them who in spiritual sensitiveness
stands next to Rembrandt is his own pupil,
Pieter de Hooch, of whose work the Gallery
contains four admirable examples (794, 834, 835,
2552). In these scenes, composed of the most
commonplace material — the backyard of a house
with a housewife watching her servant cleaning
fish, another backyard with a woman and child
coming out of an outhouse, a woman offering a
visitor a glass of wine — he has expressed a
serenity and contentment of a quite different
64
A Dutch I\ i erior
/»;• Hooch
!
A Man's Pom rait
Fran s Hals
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
order from that grosser satisfaction which the
Dutch painter too often found exclusively in the
insignia of prosperity — thick velvets and furs,
massive metalwork, well-stocked larders and
prize cattle. He is possessed of an uncommon
power of divining those rare, still moments when
the scales fall from the eyes and a trivial
incident — the gesture of a friend, the attitude of
a woman waiting at an open door, the spark of
light in a glass of clear wine — discovers some
hitherto unsuspected phase of beauty and sig-
nificance. One such moment he has eternalised
in A Dutch Interior (834). The picture has a
special interest, as it displays the peculiarities of
the painter's technique, which has been carefully
analysed by Sir William Armstrong. "The more
luminous parts of it, such as the costumes of the
two men at the table, are painted in semi-opaque
colour over a brilliant orange ground. Here and
there the orange may be seen peeping out, and
its presence elsewhere gives a peculiar peai-liness
to the tints laid upon it. De Hooch painted very
thinly. In this picture the maid with the brazier
is an afterthought. She is painted over the tiles
and other details which now show through her
skirts. Before she was put in, this space to the
E 65
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right was occupied by an old gentleman with a
white beard and moustache, and a wide-brimmed
hat, all of which can be descried under the
brown of the mantelpiece. , . . Probably de
Hooch did not understand how a single coat of
oil paint loses its opacity with time, especially
when free from white ; and so some of his
happiest notes have lost their voice. All this
process is made use of to get as near as possible
to actual illusion in the painting of sunlight."
This picture resumes many of the distinctive
qualities of the Dutch painters : their delight in
the texture of things — note the rich black of the
woman's jacket which seems to communicate to
the tips of the fingers the very feel of velvet —
the depth of their distances —you can walk over
the tiled floor right into the room and in and out
among the figures — their preoccupation with
sunlight caught in rooms, playing broadly on
bare walls, or concentrated as sparks on the
facets of glass and metal — their choice of
moments of pause and the intermission of labour
in preference to times of action and dramatic
happenings. All these features are again
present in Metsu's The Music Lesson (839) — a
subject for which the Dutch painters seem to
66
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
have had a special predilection as being most apt
to provide them with that note of quiet harmony
which they were always seeking. Very character-
istic of this northern school is the painter's
treatment of light. He does not dispense it with
the magnificent prodigality of the Italians ; for
him, painting beneath the watery skies of
Holland, it is a precious thing, to be dealt with
frugally, communicating a sense of pleasure the
more exquisite as its quantity is the more re-
stricted. The hide and seek of light becomes the
central interest in the picture — losing itself in
the shadows, finding itself again in the hair of
the man's head, on his collar and cuff, in the
tilted wine-glass, on the scroll of music, and
mostly subtly caressing the pendent earring and
the skin of the woman's neck.
It has been observed that Dutch painting
succeeds better on the whole with the upper
classes than with the proletariat. Jan Steen, the
brewer, however, was equally at home in low life
and in high, and here we have examples of his
work in both spheres. An Interior with Figures
(1378) presents one of those ale-house scenes
which seem to have had a never-failing attraction
for the Dutch picture-buying public. As a com-
67
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position it exhibits Steen's familiar weakness —
the disproportion between the minute figures
and the immensity of the surrounding space,
resulting in a consequent absence of focus. The
microscopic style of painting is carried to its
furthest limits in Gerard Dou's The Poulterer's
Shop (825), in which every feather of the bird's
tail and every hair of the animal's fur is
numbered.
The almost complete absence in the Dutch
rooms of pictures of historical interest is a
witness to the somewhat strange indifference
of the Dutch painters to what was most stirring
in a singularly stirring epoch. Judging from these
pictures we should suppose that they painted in
an atmosphere of profound and unbroken peace ;
in point of fact war was almost continuous with
Spain, with England and with France. A notable
exception to this lack of interest in the dramatic
incidents in the nation's life is to be found in
Terburg's Peace of Milnster (896), perhaps the
most vivid presentment of a historical scene in
existence. " The Lanzas of Velazquez may be the
greatest historical picture in the world," says
Sir W. Armstrong, "but this Terborch is history.
The event happened thus, in this room, with all
68
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
these people, disposed much as the painter, who
was there, has arranged them on his panel."
Each of the sixty heads is a highly individualised
portrait, and yet the picture is not an aggregate
of detached portraits but a single whole,
brought into perfect unity by the effective
arrangement of the lighting. An amusing story
is told of the circumstances under which this
picture came to be acquired by the Gallery. It
was sold at the Demidoff sale at Paris in 1 868,
when Sir William Boxall, then Director of the
National Gallery, was outbid by the Marquis of
Hertford, who secured the picture for nearly
£7000. On his death it passed to his half-brother,
Sir Richard Wallace. Three years later a rather
shabbily dressed individual called at the Gallery
with a request that he might show a picture
which he had brought with him to the Director.
At the time Sir William was too busy to go into
the matter. " But you had better just have a
glance — I ask no more," said the visitor. Sir
William again refused, but the persistent stranger
proceeded to uncover the picture and displayed
to the Director's amazement the masterpiece of
Terburg which he had vainly endeavoured to
purchase at the sale. " My name is Wallace, Sir
69
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Richard Wallace," said the stranger quietly,
" and I came to offer this picture to the National
Gallery." " I nearly fainted," Sir William related
afterwards, " I had nearly refused the Peace of
Minister — one of the wonders of the world."
The Gallery had to wait long for an important
work of Frans Hals, and the Family Portrait
(2285), which was purchased in 1908 for £25,000,
cannot be considered one of the painter's most
successful efforts. The composition is ingenious ;
the children are painted with the charm of frank
reality ; and the brushwork, with what has been
described as "a kind of animal relish in the
strokes of it." is a constant delight. But the
accentuation of the lights on the lace and linen
worn by every member of the group creates
a rather blotchy effect, while an awkwardness
and lack of animation in the central figure — the
pere de famille — communicates a certain feeling
of heaviness to the whole picture. The fact is
that Hals seems to have been happier when at
work upon festive scenes more congenial to his
own temperament, such as the groups of jolly
burgomasters at Haarlem. A Mail's Portrait '(1251)
and the two heads recently bequeathed by the
late Mr George Salting give more evidence of
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that triumphant ease which constitutes the great
charm of this extraordinarily modern old master.
Dutch landscape can be fully studied at the
National Gallery in the works of its three great-
est exponents — Hobbema, Ruysdael and Cuyp.
Of the half-dozen Hobbemas the most original is
The Avenue, Middleharnu (830), one of the most
popular landscapes in the collection. Hobbema
has survived the depreciation of Ruskin — "a
single dusky roll of Turner's brush is more truly
expressive of the infinity of foliage than the
niggling of Hobbema could have rendered his
canvas if he had worked on it till Doomsday "
— for in spite of an intrusive and possibly inac-
curate detail his pictures are usually full of a
sense of repose and the beauty of design, and in
none are these qualities more pleasing than in
The Avenue. " In fact, this and Yermeer's View of
Delft at the Hague/' said Mr Arthur Strong,
"are the great landscapes of the seventeenth
century. Nothing can be more direct or uncom-
promising than the artist's realism. A road
bordered on either side with meagre poplars
leads straight ahead to where the open sea is
suggested though not shown. Whether the artist
willed it or not, the scene is eloquent with a
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haunting sort of poetry. The monotony, the dull
sky, the trees at intervals, picture better than
many a professed allegory the prosaic limits and
routine of ordinary experience."
Ruysdael, who according to the critic just
quoted excelled Hobbema in emotional insight
and suggestion, painted, in Ruskin's opinion,
merely "good furniture pictures, unworthy of
praise and undeserving of blame." He found his
material not only in the flats of his native land
but also in the wild mountain solitudes of
Norway, the scenery with that fatal sublimity
which has such a disconcerting trick of looking
commonplace on canvas. Here we have typical
examples of his landscapes of the waterfall
variety and two sympathetic studies of single
trees.
Cuyp did for landscape what de Hooch did
for the genre interior — he made it a background
for the play of atmosphere and light. All his
pictures in the Gallery, and particularly A Land-
scape with Figures, Evening (53), and the Large
Dart (96l) show that his main preoccupation was
the problem of sunlight in the open air. He
confined himself to one single aspect of the
problem, the rendering of the golden glow of
72
Cornelius van her Geest
l'a>i Dyck
THE DUTCH SCHOOL
late afternoon, and, like almost all the Dutch
painters, contented himself with reproducing
indefinitely the particular theme which he had
perfectly mastered.
73
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
The Primitives of the northern schools are less
exhaustively represented in the Gallery than
those of Italy, but the company though small is
select, and comprehends all the great masters
— Van Eyck, M ending, Roger van der Weyden,
Gerard David, Mabuse. Though the painting
of the early Flemings is delicate and perfect
in technique, fascinating in its combination of
childlike naivete and profound sincerity, it can-
not be said to hold the same place in the history
of art as that of the early Italians. It is not
merely that the Flemish school devoted itself
to expressing " the angular and bony sanctities of
the North," while Italy then as always possessed
"the fatal gift of beauty." The difference lies
rather in the fact that the art of the one marked
the end of the old order, while that of the other
heralded the dawn of the new. The art of Giotto
74
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
was an art of promise, of awakening from the
dead, an aspiration towards a new ideal, an
attempt to render painting capable of expressing
a wider intellectual life, and therefore in a sense
belongs to the present rather than the past. The
art of Van Eyck and Memling embodied the
conceptions of the Middle Ages, and a mode of
life that was passing away. With a minute loveli-
ness of its own, it was nevertheless a finished thing,
looking to the past rather than to the future, and
therefore it had in it no seeds of development.
The first impression that strikes the visitor to
the Flemish room is the smallness of the pictures.
Fresco painting was an art which could never be
acclimatised in the humid atmosphere of the Low
Countries. Their painters were obliged by the
actual physical conditions of their environment to
search for some less perishable medium. This the
brothers Van Eyck discovered in a preparation of
linseed and nut oils. This medium was favour-
able to a very high finish, but was only applicable
to work on a small scale. Flemish art therefore
was necessarily an art of miniature. The second
impression which these pictures make is that of
a certain affinity with the craft of the worker in
metals and precious stones. The Flemish painters
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seem to have approached the graphic arts from
the point of view not of draughtsmen but of gold-
smiths and jewellers. They evince no feeling for
line or for broad effects of masses of colour. They
care more for elaborate detail, an illusion of hard
metallic surface, and sharp points of light like
those on the facets of jewels. Their pictures have
a richness and sparkle and solidity as though their
inspiration were drawn from reliquaries and
precious caskets. It might almost be supposed
that they were the work of men who had been
trained as jewellers.
But whatever their training, their achievement,
measured by their technical perfection, can never
cease to astonish. The work of the brothers Hu-
bert and Jan Van Eyck is an amazing phenomenon.
Appearing as they did, suddenly, without any
long line of predecessors to explain them, they
seem to have reached the goal of complete mastery
of execution at a single sti'ide. " The first Italian
Renaissance," says Fromentin, "had nothing com-
parable to this. And in the particular order of the
sentiments they expressed, and of the subjects
they represented, it must be agreed that no Lom-
bard, Tuscan or Venetian school produced any-
thing that resembles the first outburst of the
76
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
school at Bruges." There is nothing here from
the work of the elder brother Hubert, but Jan
Van Eyck is represented by that brilliant master-
piece, Jan Arnolfmi and his Wife (186). " It is one
of the most precious possessions of the national
collection/' says Sir Edward Poynter, "and, in
respect of its marvellous finish, combined with
the most astounding truth of imitation and effect,
perhaps the most remarkable picture in the world."
Thanks to his knowledge of the chemistry of paint,
the painter's colours are as fresh as on the day he
mixed them. The five-hundred-year-old panel is
also in a marvellously fine state of preservation,
in spite of undergoing many vicissitudes of for-
tune— it was discovered by General Hay in a
house in Brussels where he was taken after hav-
ing been wounded at the battle of Waterloo.
The merchant, a gaunt and ungainly figure,
with an enormous beaver hat crushing down upon
his head and a shapeless fur-trimmed gown de-
scending to just above his thin ankles, stands in
the midst of a quietly lighted little room, holding
his wife's hand in his own. The woman is dressed
in a long-skirted gown of a beautifully rich green
colour, against which her delicate white hands
show like an ivory carving. There is something
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deferential and yielding in her pose that sug-
gests the drooping Madonnas of mediaeval French
sculpture. Though remorseless in its fidelity to
fact, there is nevertheless a tenderness in the
portraiture, hinting at a certain reverence in the
painter for the discreet and faithful relationship
existing between these two grave, simple beings.
Their own character of discretion and simplicity
is impressed too upon the soberly but richly
furnished room. Here Van Eyck finds full scope
for his delight in minute detail and exquisite finish.
The circular mirror hanging upon the wall at the
end of the room is a miracle of delicate workman-
ship. Its convex surface reflects all the contents of
the room and also a door showing a space beyond,
in which two other figures may be distinguished.
Into the frame are let ten diminutive pictures of
the ten "moments" of the Passion of Christ,
designed no doubt to furnish a subject for the
meditation of the lady while engaged in the
lengthy and intricate business of arranging her
hair and headdress. And all this is given in a space
of not much bigger than the size of a five-shilling
piece ! The mirror, together with the chaplet of
beads hanging by the side of it and the brass
chandelier, gave Van Eyck an opportunity for
78
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
introducing those points of light as seen reflected
by metallic and glassy surfaces, the delight in
which he shared with all the members of the
early Flemish school. The carved woodwork of
the chair, the twig broom attached to it, the red
hangings of the bed, the strip of finely woven
carpet, the wooden sandals, the oranges on the
table, placed so as to carry the light into a
shadowy corner — all the details are rendered
with the same zeal and fidelity as the faces of the
man and woman themselves ; and yet, in spite of
this apparent absence of discrimination, in the
general view each falls at once into its own
subordinate place, and the effect of the picture,
so far from being busy and overcrowded, is one of
almost austere simplicity. Upon the wall of the
room the painter has inscribed his signature, " Jan
Van Eyck was here," a phrase which professes with
a fine mingling of modesty and pride his claim to
have painted exactly what he saw.
Mabuse was the first of the Flemings to be
affected by the influence of the Italian Renaissance.
Until lately no important work of his hung in the
( iallery, although one of his small portraits, A
Man and Wife (l(iS')), painted with microscopic
detail, even down to the stubble of the man's
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beard, is a masterpiece in little. In 1911, howeyer,
the Gallery secured the finest example of his first
or Flemish period, The Adoration of the Kings
(2790), from the collection at Castle Howard. The
price paid was £40,000 and, great though the sum
appears for an example of a master not in the very
first rank, it is said that the vendor, Lady Carlisle,
refused an offer of double this amount made by a
private collector. The picture has been described
by Mr D. S. MacColl as " a cold-hearted capable
piece of picture making." Certainly the subject
has been presented with more inwardness of de-
votional feeling, but never with greater richness
of invention and more indefatigable minuteness
of handling. The characteristic Flemish delight in
the painting of jewels and precious embroideries
is very marked, and indeed the painter appears
to have been so intent upon giving the kings
gorgeous raiment that he has neglected to give
them character. The two kings, standing on either
side of the group, have scarcely more vitality or
expression than a tailor's dummy, and seem to
exist merely for the sake of their brocaded
costumes and the fantastically designed Gothic
jewellery of their crowns and of the cups which
they bring as presents. The background is an
80
Jan Arnolfini and ih> Wife
Jan I 'an Eyck
Chapeau de Ton.
Rubens
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
elaborate scheme of ruined architecture, already
betraying the Italian influence. Perhaps the most
successful feature of the picture is the group of
large angels overhead, and particularly happy in
conception is the flight of lesser angels flocking
like birds from the remote distances of the skies.
No greater contrast in art could be conceived
than that between the meticulous, patient
brushwork of these early Flemish masters and
the large, summary, exuberant manner of their
great successor, Peter Paul Rubens. Some
fifteen hundred canvases represent the fruit of
his prolific genius — not to mention the innumer-
able productions of his pupils, of which he
usually supplied the design and added the
finishing touches — and of these the National
Gallery possesses about a dozen superb examples,
including, as well as his characteristic historical
and allegorical compositions, specimens of his
work in landscape and portraiture. The Abduction
of the Sabine Women (38) shows the master in the
plenitude of his amazing vigour. The moment
chosen for illustration is that when Romulus
gave the signal for the Roman soldiers to kidnap
the daughters of the Sabines, and the scene
represents a tumult of human forms — muscular
F 81
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frames of warriors in steel black armour, and
resisting figures of handsome women, not Sabines
but pure-blooded Flemings, with dazzling arms
and shoulders, clad in the sumptuous silks and
velvets of sixteenth-century costumes. " A
miracle of agitation," so R. A. M. Stevenson
describes it, "a flush tide of the richest colour,
which positively seems to boil up in swirling
eddies of harmonious form. Its whole surface
is swept by lines which rush each other on like
the rapid successive entrances of an excited
stretto, till the violent movement seems to
undulate the entire pattern of the picture."
The same exuberant energy and joie de vivre
animate The Triumph of Silenus (853), in which
the jolly drunkard, a mass of " too too solid flesh,"
is borne along by a rollicking crew of laughing
nymphs and leering satyrs. These works con-
stitute a kind of rhetoric in painting, an eloquent
and sonorous language issuing in fluent and
glowing periods, which perhaps the painter had
learned to adopt in the execution of those mural
decorations for halls and palaces where he had
to raise his voice, as it were, in order to make
himself heard throughout a vast space. They
are the works too of a man painting in haste,
82
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
with whom there was scarcely a pause between
thought and action. For Rubens was a courtier
and a politician as well as a painter, and
occasionally assumed the role of an ambassador.
Sometimes he lent his art to the service of
diplomacy, as in The Blessings of Peace (46), which
he presented to Charles I. when he came to the
court of St James's as the accredited ambassador
of the King of Spain, with the object of persuad-
ing the English king to conclude peace with that
country. The picture was sold by the Parliament
after King Charles's death for the paltry sum
of £ L 03 and nearly two hundred years later was
bought for £3000 by the Marquis of Stafford who
presents 1 it to the nation. It was possibly while
painting this picture that an English courtier
asked R.ib^ns, "Does the ambassador of his
Catholic Mijesty amuse himself with painting?"
To which he replied, " I amuse myself some-
times with being an ambassador."
The single portrait by Rubens which the
Gallery possesses, the Ckapeau de Poil (852), is
one of the most celebrated and successful of his
essays in this branch of art. In general it may
be said that Rubens lacked that scrupulous
attention, that attitude of deference to his
83
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subject, which is necessary if the painter is to
possess himself of the reticent inner spirit which
cannot be captured by a seizure of merely
external accidents. He makes his women in
particular conform to a preconceived type of
beauty which we recognise as peculiarly his own.
With her full rounded forehead and small chin,
her large inexpressive eyes, her ample swelling
contours, Helene Fourment, the painter's sister-in-
law, the subject of the Chapeau clePoil, emphatically
belongs to that ideal Avhich consists in voluptuous-
ness l-ather than grace of form and in a certain
seductive charm rather than refinement of intel-
lect or depth of character. Our attention is directed
less to the personality of the sitter than to the
marvellous effect of the reflected light which plays
upon her face. " No one who has not beheld
this masterpiece of painting," says Dr Waagen,
" can form any conception of the transparency and
brilliancy with which the local colours in the
features and complexion, though under the shadow
of a broad-brimmed hat, are brought out and made
to tell, while the different parts are rounded and
relieved, with the finest knowledge and use of
reflected lights."
The Chateau de Stein (66) affords a magnificent
84
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
example of the achievement of Rubens in land-
scape. On the left in the midst of a group
of lofty trees stands a country mansion, said
to be his own residence, with steep roof and tall
chimneys ; the rest of the picture is a broad
stretch of fertile plain bathed in a golden
autumnal light. Perhaps no landscape ever more
completely satisfied that delight in sheer spacious-
ness which the eye always experiences in roaming
over a vast expanse of open country. It is moreover
an amazing instance of Rubens's power of recon-
structing a scene from memory, for this typically
Flemish scene was painted, not in Flanders, but
at Genoa.
Van Dyck, the greatest of the pupils of
Rubens, may almost be claimed as the father
of the English school of portraiture. During
the latter part of his life he lived in England,
was appointed painter to court and received
a knighthood from the king ; he was the
fashionable portrait painter of his age — he painted
some three hundred portraits while in England —
and from his art the masters of the succeeding
century, Gainsborough and Reynolds, drew no
little of their inspiration. Of his half-dozen
portraits at the National Gallery the most
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important is that of Charles the First (1172), sold
by one parliament after the king's execution
for £150 and bought by another in 1885 from
the Duke of Marlborough for £17,500. It is the
most imposing of the four and twenty portraits
that Van Dyck painted of the English king, in
whom he found the ideal of the Cavalier type,
the dignity and refinement of which apparently
pleased him more than the coarser, more energetic
manhood of Rubens. The king, clad in armour
and carrying a marshal's baton, is mounted on
a powerful dun-coloured charger. The contrast
with the massive proportions of the animal gives
the king's figure an additional slightness and
elegance; his bearing is dignified, with a sug-
gestion of disdainful defiance ; his expression
is one of melancholy, together with a fatal
insouciance. Van Dyck, Cavalier in all his
sympathies, could hardly help poetising the
Prince of Cavaliers, suppressing the obstinacy
and duplicity of his character, dwelling only on
his grace, his courage, his refinement. Is it
merely in the light of after events that we
seem to divine in this lonely figure some hint of
fatality, a certain air of foreknowledge of disaster,
or had the painter himself some premonition
86
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
of the tragedy lying in wait for that unhappy
monarch ?
In the portrait of Cornelius van tier Geest (52)
we see another type, that of the scholar and
amateur of the arts, with which Van Dyck was
also in special sympathy. It is said that the
painter regarded this work as his masterpiece,
and carried it about with him to show to his
patrons as a sample of what he could do in
portraiture. It is the portrait of an elderly man,
grey-bearded, with deep-set thoughtful eyes, the
face encircled in a ruff. " The eyes are miracles
of drawing and painting," said G. F. Watts.
"They are a little tired and overworked, and
do not so much see anything as indicate the
thoughtful brain behind. How wonderful the
flexible mouth ! with the light shining through
the sparse moustache. How tremulously yet
firmly painted. . . . Not a touch is put in for
what is understood by f effect.' Dexterous in
a superlative degree, there is not in the ordinary
sense a dexterous dab doing duty for honourable
serious work ; nothing done to look well at one
distance or another, but to be right at every
distance."
The German school is conspicuous in the
37
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Gallery chiefly in the portraits of Diirer and
Holbein. Until lately Diirer was unrepresented
in the Gallery, but the recent purchase of the
artist's Portrait of his Father (1938) enables us
to see him at his best both as draughtsman and
colourist. There is always something peculiarly
intimate in a painter's portrait of his parents, but
in depth of insight and tenderness of sympathy
there is none that surpasses this earnest study of
a man who, as Diirer himself records, had passed
his life in stern labour, had been proved by many
trials and adversities, was a man of few words,
and peaceable to all, and had won praise from all
who knew him for his honourable and upright
life. An inscription at the top of the panel records
that the age of the father was seventy and that
of the son twenty-six.
Holbein stood in something of the same relation
to Henry VIII. as Velazquez to Philip IV. of
Spain ; both painters created their royal masters
for posterity, and both monarchs had a just idea
of the genius of their painters. Said King Henry
to one of his courtiers who had spoken slightingly
of the German artist, " I tell you that of seven
peasants I can make seven lords, but not one
Holbein ! " Though no portrait of Henry appears
88
A Canon \\i> his Patron Saints
(4
<
o ?
C
D
THE FLEMISH AND GERMAN SCHOOLS
in the Gallery, Holbein's connection with Eng-
land is illustrated by two of his finest works.
The Ambassadors and Christina of Denmark. The
Ambassadors (1314) stands next in importance
amoner the master's works to the Darmstadt
Madonna. It presents the portraits of two men,
standing in somewhat stiff and inexpressive
attitudes on either side of a wooden stand, the
one the French ambassador in England, wearing
a heavy gold chain and clad in the rich bulky
costume of the period, the other the Bishop of
Lavaur, enveloped in a sable-lined, long-sleeved
gown of mulberry and black brocade. The pro-
portions of both the figures are short in relation
to the heads, the effect of squatness being ex-
aggerated in that of the ambassador by the
breadth of the coat and its swelling sleeves. On
the shelves of the stand are a number of
accessories, a Turkish rug, a celestial globe and
other astronomical instruments, a lute, a case of
flutes and an open music-book, all strongly and
beautifully painted, with great minuteness but no
confusion of detail. A curious bone-like object
stretching across the mosaic floor in the fore-
ground has given rise to much speculation as to
its nature and meaning. It appears to be a human
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skull seen in distorted perspective, which has
been conjectured to be a punning allusion to the
artist's name — kohl bein or hollow bone. The
colouring is brilliant and harmonious, and has
retained its freshness quite undimmed by time.
The picture, it is interesting to note, is painted
on ten separate boards joined together vertically,
a fact which may have had some effect upon the
planning of the composition.
The portrait of Christina of Denmark (247 5), the
sixteen-year-old widow of the Duke of Milan,
was painted by Holbein for Henry VIII., who at
one time thought of inviting her to share his
throne. Her reply to this proposition is said to
have been, " Tell his Majesty of England that if
I had two heads I would willingly put one at his
disposal, having only one I prefer to keep it for
myself." The retort probably has about as much
authenticity as most of the bons mots of history,
although judging by the lurking humour in her
face we can well believe that she was capable of
it. In the three hours' sitting which she gave to
Holbein he secured an imperishable record of a
vivid and intriguing personality. She stands
somewhat primly, habited entirely in black, with
her pretty hands clasped in front of her holding
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a glove. Her shadowless white face arrests the
attention with an alluring subtle expression which
rather baffles interpretation. The patient scrutinis-
ing gaze and the quiet smile about the lips hint
at a mind busy with its own secret commentary
upon the spectacle of life, neither astonished
nor perplexed but secure in its own judgments.
The face has a subtle suggestion of mobility,
as though its present equilibrium of emotion
might at any moment be upset by a mood
of petulance or laughter.
9i
VI
THE SPANISH SCHOOL
" I confess I have very little admiration for the
Spanish school generally," said Sir Charles
Eastlake, and consequently we find that of the
five hundred and fourteen pictures which were
added to the Gallery during his directorship
Spain was represented by only three ! The fact is
that, until comparatively recent times, Italy so
dazzled the eyes of connoisseurs that they were
more or less indifferent to the glories of the sister
peninsula. Marshal Soult was perhaps a little in
advance of the taste of his age when, during the
Peninsular War, he sent skirmishers ahead of his
army, armed with a " Dictionnaire des professeurs
des Beaux-arts en Espagne," to identify the most
famous canvases, which he subsequently compelled
their owners to part with at his own terms. But
even had Wellington shown a similar enterprise
and lack of scruple, there was at that time no
national collection to receive these very covetable
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spoils of war. Some endeavour has been made of
late to remove the reproach of poverty from the
Spanish school at the Gallery, but much still
remains to be done. Although not a single work
of El Greco or of Goya of any importance has yet
been acquired, we should be thankful, however,
that we are able to see Velazquez at least as well
as, if not better than, in any public gallery out of
Spain.
The first in the line of the great Spanish
painters, Theotocopuli, better known as El Greco,
has been the last in winning recognition. The
distortion of his form and the strangeness of his
colour have caused him to be regarded as bizarre,
and lacking in the primal sanities of great art.
It would be impossible to form a just conception
of his genius from the two small works to be seen
here, although they are sufficiently typical of his
highly individual manner. Christ driving the
Traders out of the Temple (14.">7) is full of that
tumultuous violence and strained gesture which
are characteristic of the painter's temper. The
portrait known as St Jerome (1122) shows the
same energy of exaggeration. The gaunt elonga-
tion of the face and the emphatic gesture of the
hand — the thumb turned resolutely down on the
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page of the book — give together an extraordinary
expression of defiant and remorseless determina-
tion. The type is that of the churchman of all
time, or perhaps rather a reductio ad absurdum
of the type, austere, dogmatic, inquisitorial.
Though by descent a Greek, and by training an
Italian, El Greco nevertheless expressed more
intensely than perhaps any native painter has
ever done those qualities of savagery and intran-
sigence that lie but a little way beneath the
grave surface of the Spanish character.
Equally dramatic and passionate is Zurbai-an,
in his Franciscan Monk (230), but in this case the
emotion is accompanied by a strong grasp of that
material reality which Greco's visionary gaze
altogether ignored. As a rule, prayer has been
rendered in art with a rather mawkish senti-
mentality, chiefly expressed by a strained upturn-
ing of the eyes ; here the eyes are almost hidden
in shadow, yet the fervour of the man's soul is as
piercing as a sharp cry. Most of the painters who
tnrned out religious pictures to supply the demands
of the Church, when the Church was the principal
patron of art, probably painted such subjects
because they were obliged to; Zurbaran was a
religious painter because his temperament would
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not allow him to be anything else. The man
who painted the Franciscan Monk was himself a
monk at heart. " He is a Spanish Fra Angelico,"
says Mr Havelock Ellis, "that is to say, a very
realistic Angelico, whose knees rest firmly on the
earth." How firmly they rest on the earth we
may judge from The Adoration of the Shepherds
(235), a work formerly attributed to Velazquez.
Zurbaran was the son of a small farmer in the
province of Estremadura, and here we have a
wonderful realisation of the peasants whom he
knew and loved so well, with their intentness
of expression and their simple direct gestures
offering their country gifts of yearling lambs and
baskets of bread. The same directness of vision is
seen in the portrait of a Lady as St Margaret
(1930), joined to a most consummate craftsman-
ship. All these pictures reveal the vigour and
simplicity of the peasant mind, a forthright way
of seeing things without any compromise or
complexity.
No one can be said truly to know Velazquez
who has not seen him at Madrid. His works have
travelled little compared with those of other
great masters who worked in oils, but of those
which have left Spain England possesses a liberal
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share. Indeed Justi says that if all the works of
Velazquez scattered among the various private
galleries in England could be brought together,
they would form a collection rivalling that at the
Prado. But if the student of Velazquez cannot go
to the Prado, without question the next best
place for him to betake himself to is the Spanish
room at the National Gallery. To be sure the
experts have been busy here insinuating their
doubts as to whether this or that work is verit-
ably by the hand of the master, and in some cases
they must be allowed to have made good their
charges of wrong attribution. In the case of
The Adoration of the Shepherds Velazquez's loss
has been Zurbaran's gain. The ascription to
Velazquez of The Dead Warrior (741) is little
more than a pious, or perhaps rather an impious,
opinion ; Senor de Beruete has his doubts about
the authenticity of the gallant Admiral Pulido
Pareja, and assigns The Betrothal to an Italian
artist, Luca Giordano ; Sir W. Armstrong con-
jectures the full-length portrait of Philip IV. to
be by Mazo ; a year or two ago the report that
the signature of a pupil had been discovered on the
Rokeby Venus sent the authorities peering at the
canvas through their magnifying-glasses without
96
>! I HESS OK Ml KAN
//■•//•tin
Philip [V
l'elas<]uez
THE SPANISH SCHOOL
however succeeding in finding the tell-tale
initials. Passing over all these dubious works
except the last, which we can on no account
surrender, we are left with Christ in the House of
Martha, admittedly an early work, Christ at the
Column, The Wild Boar Hunt, together with a
sketch, possibly utilised in painting it, entitled
A Duel in the Prado, the portrait bust of Philip
IV. and Veims and Cupid.
The Wild Boar Hunt (197), though its authen-
ticity is undoubted, has been damaged by fire and
restoration. Lord Cowley, to whom it was given
by Ferdinand VII. of Spain, sent it to a picture
dealer to be relined. In the process the use of
an overheated iron destroyed a portion of the
surface. Dreading the consequences of his blunder,
the dealer was on the verge of despair when
Lance, a painter of flower and fruit pieces, sug-
gested that he should put the damaged canvas
to rights. He repainted "out of his head" the
groups in the foreground on the left and some of
the middle distance, and, as he ingeniously put
it, "my own style of painting enabled me to keep
pretty near the mark." Shortly afterwards he had
an opportunity of putting his own pretensions to
the test. When the picture was being exhibited
G 97
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he met two connoisseurs of his acquaintance and
challenged them with the remark : " It looks to
me as if it had been a good deal repainted." " No ;
you're wrong there/' was the gratifying reply,
" it is remarkably free from repaints." A compari-
son of the restored picture with Goya's copy of it
in its original state suggests however that Lance
may have somewhat exaggerated the extent of
his alterations.
Beruete's remark that Velazquez spent a large
part of his time in chanting a hymn to ugliness
was probably prompted by the number of canvases
which he devoted to portraying the heavy
features of the sombre house of Hapsburg and the
strange creatures, dwarfs and buffoons, attached
to the Court. But for Velazquez, where there was
atmosphere, beauty was never lacking, and ugliness
was only an ugly name for life and character. Mr
Havelock Ellis indeed ingeniously suggests that
the necessity of perpetually painting a busy
monarch like Philip IV., absorbed in affairs of
state and pleasure, who could never spare much
time for a sitting, was of advantage to his art,
obliging him to adopt swift, simple methods and
an impressionistic manner which he might other -
wise never have so completely evolved. In the
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marvellous bust portrait of Philip IF. (745) we
have an instance of his method of treating the
unlovely Hapsburg facial type, attenuating and
disguising nothing, but dignifying it by the force
of character and converting it by sheer brilliancy
of brushwork into a thing of beauty. Few portraits
in the world give the spectator the same certi-
tude of being in the presence of a living person-
ality. He has not only painted Philip IV. in the
flesh, the lank, pale hair, the high but unintel-
lectual forehead, the dull and weary eyes, the
flaccid cheeks, the ponderous lower jaw — he has
painted also the sombre, twilit spirit of the
monarch doomed to preside over the decadence
of a death-struck empire, with strength and
understanding insufficient for his task, bearing
himself with a melancholy dignity, all but worn
out by that uneasiness which oppresses the
head that wears a crown. The portrait seems
to sum up in a single poignant image the stifling
atmosphere of the joyless Spanish court of
the counter-Reformation, and brings to mind
that significant anecdote of Philip's father, of
whom it is said that once when he heard a man
laughing he remarked : " Either he is mad or he
is reading Don Quixote!" On no other terms was
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laughter intelligible within the gloomy precincts
of the Escorial.
The group of Velazquez's works was crowned
by the acquisition of the Venus and Cupid (2057),
in 1906. When the picture was on the point of
being sold out of the country, the National Art
Collections Fund came to the rescue and raised
by subscription the ,£45,000 necessary for its
purchase. It has the distinction of being the only
female nude that Velazquez ever painted. Venus,
lying upon a couch of silvery-grey, rests her head,
which is turned away from the spectator, upon
her hand, and looks at herself in a mirror sup-
ported by a kneeling cupid. There is here none
of the idealistic grace of the conventional goddess,
but just the frankly realistic vision of a woman,
the beauty of which lies in the perfect flow of the
bounding lines of the figure and the exquisite
modulations of the back. The picture is dis-
tinguished perhaps more than any other of his
works by that quality which places Velazquez
apart from any other painter who ever lived —
a quality of aristocratic reserve, of emotionless
detachment, as of one who regarded as irrelevant
any personal comment of his own, but was content
to state facts with a marmoreal coldness and pre-
100
THE SPANISH SCHOOL
cision. Beneath it might well be written : " Beauty
is truths truth beauty — that is all ye know on
earth and all ye need to know."
Velazquez stands alone in Spain, for the
Spanish spirit is essentially umesthetic, perhaps
even anti-aesthetic. It is concerned with art
chiefly as an expression of character and drama.
Velazquez never took sides — as Xurbaran, for
instance, vehemently took a side when he painted
his passionate monk in prayer. He is apathetic
to everything except beauty. And that beauty he
found first and last in the silvery ambience of
the atmosphere, that great lustrating element
which purifies every object that it touches. But
to understand how he realised this beauty it is
necessary to stand in that little room in the Prado
in which is hung the miracle of Las Meninas.
As the fame of Velazquez has increased that
of Murillo has decreased. In critical as well as
popular estimation he once stood at the head
of the Spanish school. His canvases were the
favourite spoils of Marshal Soult in the Peninsular
War. Nowadays when the first commandment
which the high priests of art criticism impose
upon artists is written " Thou shalt not be
sentimental," he has been degraded nearly to
IOI
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the level of Greuze, and in the reaction against
the facile picturesqueness of his work many of
its genuine pictorial qualities have been over-
looked. The National Gallery possesses no speci-
men of those " Conceptions/' types of "gipsy
Madonnahood " as Ruskin called them, which
formed his speciality. But these apotheoses of
" pretty peasant girls, posing in beautiful robes
that do not belong to them, and simulating
ecstatic emotions they have never felt," are of
less solid worth than his frankly secular scenes
of the peasant life of Andalusia. No better
example of these could be found than A Boy
Drinking (1286), which is almost free from the
very self-conscious picturesqueness of most of his
beggar boys. There is all of what we understand
by the South in this picture, its rich sun-stained
colour, its eager sensuous delight, its mingling
of animation with sleepy indolence. Murillo's
naturalism has here had free play ; the gesture
of the lifted hand and arm is finely observed,
and the luminous black, squat-shouldered bottle,
imprisoning the luscious vintage of Seville,
"cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,"
is painted with a manifest gusto. It is a bottle
of character, a bottle with a soul !
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THE SPANISH SCHOOL
The two portraits and two studies by Goya
suggest rather than display the many-sided
genius of the last of the great Spaniards. The
sketches entitled The Picnic and The Bewitched
(14.71, 1472) show him in his gay and fantastic
moods. His unflinching realism and power of
penetration is revealed in the vivid Portrait of
Dr Feral (1951 ), conceived in a delicate scheme
of grey. But the individuality of the painter is
most forcefully expressed in the Portrait of Dona
Isabel Corbo de Porcel (1473). Perhaps no other
painter could have expressed with the same pas-
sion and precision the ambiguous charm of this
half-fascinating, half-repelling woman, with her
dark dilated eyes, her coarse full lips, her artfully
disordered hair, her whole attitude alert, daring,
provocative. He has been remorseless in exposing
the rouge on her cheeks, the kohl on her eyelids,
the belladonna in her eyes. But he has given her
something of his own exuberance and throbbing
intensity of life. This cynical, almost brutal, vision
is as equally far removed from the reserve of
Velazquez as from the sentimentalism of Murillo.
For a like expression of extravagant energy
we have to go back to El Greco, and turning
from this portrait to the hitter's austere ecclesi-
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astic, beneath an utter contrast of type we
recognise the same passionate feeling for per-
sonality which is at the root of all typically
Spanish art.
104
o
—
a
V.
-„--
<
-*»
■s.
Dona Isabel
Goya
VII
THE FRENCH SCHOOL
The genius of painting in Europe has been
migratory, visiting each of the great Western
nations in turn but never preserving its domicile
for long. After brooding over Italy in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, it winged westwards,
dwelling briefly in Spain and the Low Countries
in the seventeenth, passing over to England in
the eighteenth and finally settling in France
in the nineteenth. Thus the latest of the great
European schools of painting flourished during
the period when the National Gallery was in
process of formation. The minds of those re-
sponsible for the creation of a collection aiming
at being representative of the history of painting
must, however, necessarily be directed to the
art of the past rather than of the present, and
the directors of the National Gallery were too
busy ransacking Italy for the treasures of
her Quattrocento to take much account of
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contemporary achievements across the Channel.
The record of French art, therefore, at Trafalgar
Square stops short just at the commencement
of its most brilliant chapter. In the splendid
Poussins and Claudes there are the foundations
of what might become an excellent collection
of French pictures, but the superstructure still
remains to be added.
When the Poussins and Claude inaugurated
the renaissance of French painting, the classical
ideal was supreme in art as in literature. Nicholas
Poussin " studied the ancients so much," says
Sir Joshua Reynolds " that he acquired a habit
of thinking in their way, and seemed to know
perfectly the actions and gestures they would
use on every occasion." In his pictures of
bacchanalian revels (42, 62) he has captured
something of the rhythmic flowing motion and
vital gaiety of the Greek bas-relief. He has
succeeded in the rare achievement of recon-
structing the antique without falling into the
academic. Here at last is a classicism which,
even if we cannot quite believe in it, warms and
exhilarates instead of chilling us.
It is a little difficult for us to understand the
immense prestige which the name of Claude
106
THE FRENCH SCHOOL
Lorraine possessed for a period of nearly two
hundred years. He was judged to be as supreme
in the painting of landscape as Raphael in the
painting of the human form. Goethe eulogised
him as at once the slave and the master of
nature. Constable, writing from the house of
Sir George Beaumont where he had Rembrandt,
Rubens and Canaletto to look at, said: "The
Claudes, the Claudes are all, all, I can think
of here." Sir George's Claudes now hang with
others in the National Gallery and if they have
lost their magnetic power over us we can never-
theless feel the charm of these visionary palaces,
washed by visionary seas, these avenues of waters
with their light-tipped waves, and this calm
golden heaven, in which, as Ruskin said, he was
the first to set the sun.
It was an immense audacity of Turner to
challenge comparison with the painter who was
considered at that time to be the supreme
sovereign in the art of landscape. This he did
in the most emphatic manner, as every visitor to
the National Gallery knows who has seen his
Dido building Carthage and Sun rising in a Mist,
hanging side by side with Claude's Embarkation
oj the Qveev of Sheba and Isaac and Rebecca.
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In bequeathing this and another picture to the
trustees of the Gallery he made the following
remarkable stipulation : — " I direct that the said
pictures or paintings shall be hung, kept and
placed, that is to say, always between the two
pictures painted by Claude, the Seaport and
Mill." In imposing this condition Turner was
unjust to himself. If the whole body of his work
be compared with Claude's achievement, the
superiority of Turner's genius is never for an
instant in doubt, but if the comparison be con-
fined to these two pictures it is by no means
certain that the verdict is in his favour. The
question is summed up concisely by P. G.
Hamerton. " Claude's field was a narrow one.
Though he lived long and covered many
canvases, he seems to have had but few artistic
ideas, and the very paucity of these enabled him
to realise them with all the greater perfection.
Turner was vast in range and very unequal ;
Claude, narrow in range, but remarkably regular
in the degree of his technical success. Now, what
Turner did was this : he, a man of wide range,
attempted to contend with a man of narrow
range, on one of the narrow man's own private
specialities. He invited a comparison between his
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THE FRENCH SCHOOL
seaport with classical architecture called Dido
building Carthage, and Claude's seaport with
classical architecture known as the Embarkation
of the Queen of Sheba. The mistake of inviting
such a comparison is visible almost at the first
glance. The Claude is light, fresh, full of atmos-
phere, and that lively, inspiriting feeling which
takes possession of us when a pleasant breeze
and transparent waves invite us to sail out upon
the sea ; the Turner is heavy, and though, in
a certain sense, imposing and magnificent, is
entirely wanting in freshness."
The very antithesis of Claude's suave idealism
is a realistic little portrait group by his contem-
porary Lenain, or perhaps more coi-rectly by the
brothers Lenain (1425). The peasant woman and
her five children are all submitting with painful
gravity to the operation of having their likenesses
taken, and the result is a piece of painting of
charming freshness and the utmost intensity of
feeling. Surely no painter has ever surpassed in
intimate realisation of child character the portrait
of the timid, wistful-looking boy holding the
pitcher. In the same vein of realism, which runs
through the whole course of French painting side
by side with the traditions of academic correc t
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ness and courtly grace, is painted Chardin's
superb Study of Still Life (1258). Just a broken
loaf of bread, a black bottle and a small tumbler
half filled with wine, spread out on a piece of old
newspaper, but seen with what intensity of vision
and painted with what mastery of touch. " Oh !
it is not colour alone that you mix," wrote
Diderot to Chardin, "it is the very substance of
the objects ; it is light and air that you render."
It would seem that these humble and familiar
objects had been transformed by the artist's
imagination, so that what we see is no longer the
mere remnant of a meal, but the eternal symbols
of meat and drink — bread of bread and very wine
of very wine !
But we look in vain for any glimpse of that
gay and glowing aspect of eighteenth-century
France which Chardin ignored — the jetes galantcs,
the beds masques, the pierrots and pierrettes, the
intimacies of the boudoir, the affectations of
courtly pastoralism. Watteau is absent, though
his pupil Boucher shows one picture; absent
too are Fragonard, Perroneau, Nattier, and Lar-
gillicre. Greuze, who held a middle course
between the artificial graces of fashionable life
and the plain simplicity of the life of the
no
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people, is here with four typical heads of girls,
among them the well-known Girl with an
Apple (1020). "Courage, my good Greuze,"
was Diderot's counsel ; "introduce morality into
painting." Unfortunately he introduced senti-
mentality instead, and that peculiar " horizontal
swimming motion of the eyes like a spirit
level."
But it is when we come to more modern times
that the gaps become more numerous and more
apparent. It is impossible to attempt to form
from the miscellaneous little collection of modern
French pictures even a fragmentary idea of the
variety and fulness of French painting in the
nineteenth century. Round the walls of one of
the rooms of the Gallery we read the inscription :
" The works of those who have stood the test of
ages have a claim to that respect and veneration
to which no modern can pretend." Agreed : but
if the moderns may not claim to be respected they
have surely a claim to be seen. Taking the names
of the chief " modern " French painters who were
born before the Gallery came into existence, how
do we find them represented ? David and Ingres,
the chief exponents of the classical school which
arose after the Revolution, have one picture
in
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apiece — that of David not half completed and
that of Ingres an unworthy sketch ascribed to
him with a query. Corot, thanks to a bequest;,
comes off fairly handsomely with seven works in
his later manner. Of the Romantics, Gericault is
absent altogether. Delacroix is to be judged by
one picture which cannot be said to do him
justice. Of the Barbizon school, three examples of
Diaz have been presented, five of Daubigny, and
one insignificant example of Rousseau ; Troyon,
Jacques and Dupre have as yet no place. To
Millet and Courbet are allotted one small picture
each. Fromentin, Monticelli, Puvis de Chavannes
are among the absentees. Manet, born in 1833,
and Degas, his junior by a year, may be con-
sidered to be too modern to claim recognition,
but both are already classics and Manet some
years ago received the sanction of a place in the
Louvre. The dust of controversy still hangs
perhaps over the names of the Impressionists,
but the works of Monet, Sisley and Renoir, not
to mention others, will some day have to be
acquired if the Gallery is to reflect at all
adequately the development of French art in the
nineteenth century. However, a beginning has
been made, and for this we must be grateful.
112
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The bequest of the late Mr George Salting
forms the chief contribution to this miscellaneous
little group of modern French paintings, and
includes five examples of Corot and two of Diaz.
The Bent Tree (2625) and Wood Gatherers (2627)
admirably illustrate Corot's fondness for twilight
effects. " Bien ! Bien ! twilight commences," so
he described in a letter the close of a painter's
day. " There is now in the sky only that soft
vaporous colour of pale citron. One is losing
sight of everything, but one still feels that every-
thing is there. The birds, those voices of the
flowers, say their evening prayer, the dew
scatters pearls upon the grass, the nymphs fly,
everything is again darkened." These two
pictures with their silvery-grey trees and pale
opal-flushed skies exquisitely suggest the hush
and softness of that hour when the moths and
the stars begin to appear. In the orange cap of
the woman in The Bent Tree the painter has
added that spot of warm colour which he usually
made use of to give their full values to the per-
vading tones of grey and olive.
In Sunny Days in the Forest (2058) and The
Storm (2682) Diaz shows his preference for the
less ambiguous hours of clear light or emphatic
H 113
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gloom. His trees are of a robuster build than
Corot's quivering ghostly forms, that seem always
ready to dissolve into the encroaching mist —
trees firmly set upon widespreading roots, with
trunks of thick girth that have a history of years
of growth and struggle. " Have you seen my last
stem ? " he was wont to say to his visitors, and
it was the permanent architectural structure of
the tree that seemed to interest him more than
its changing vesture of foliage. The, Storm is a
vigorous piece of painting representing a wild
common with a few stunted wind-swept trees
beneath a heavy sky of inky clouds and broken
lights — you can almost hear the rush of wind and
the first mutter of the thunder.
The National Art Collections Fund has pre-
sented a delightful little work by Boudin, the
precursor of the Impressionists, The Harbour at
Trouville (2078), a pool of clear blue water en-
closed by two wooden jetties. The painting is
clean and crisp, and the whole picture sparkles
with a radiant light and gives the very feel of
the cool, fresh sea air.
Courbet's seashore, with its pleasant harmony
of cool colour, Daubigny's evening scene, with
the sun setting behind willows, Fantin-Latour's
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exquisite studies of flowers and his sober portrait
of Mr and Mrs Edwardes, present a few more
aspects of the French school of the nineteenth
century.
"5
VIII
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It has not infrequently been assumed that the
English school of painting had no infancy, but
sprang full-grown into life, marked by a strong
national genius, on the coming of the Hanover-
ians. Some colour is lent to this view by the
general composition of the British rooms at the
National Gallery, which only include two works
by English painters previous to the eighteenth
century: a portrait by John Bettes dated 1545
and another by William Dobson, whom Charles I.
called his "English Tintoret." Certainly the
native school, dwarfed by foreign influence at the
Renaissance and uninspired by the examples of
Spain and Holland in the seventeenth century,
received little encouragement from English
patrons of art. The court from Henry VII. to
Charles II. consistently patronised artists of
foreign birth — Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck,
Lely, Kneller. But at the same time there was
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a by no means contemptible display of native
talent, including among others the names of
Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the latter
of whom painted portraits of Mary Stuart
and Elizabeth, George Jameson, whom Horace
Walpole styled the "Scottish Van Dyck," and
Robert Walker, painter to Oliver Cromwell.
In the National Gallery, which aims at being
a historical but not an antiquarian collection,
the English school very properly begins with
William Hogarth. Borrowing nothing from foreign
traditions, Hogarth was English in his strength
and in his weaknesses. In the portrait that he
painted of himself we can read an epitome of the
English character — practical, self-reliant, clear-
sighted, kindly and just. His love of animals
a typically English trait, is seen in the promin-
ence that he gives in the picture to his dog
"Trump." His view of the intimate connection
of painting with literature and morals, another
equally national characteristic, is emphasised by
the three volumes which he has placed at the
foot of the portrait, inscribed with the names
of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift.
Lacking the all-pardoning comprehension of
Shakespeare and the sublimity of Milton, Hogarth
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shows a closer affinity with the caustic temper
of the Dean of St Patrick's. It has been urged
against him that he was a satirist rather than
an artist. Certainly no satire ever penned was
more incisive and relentless than his Marriage a la
Mode (11 3-1 1 8). Hogarth sold this famous series of
six pictures by auction in 1750., when they were
knocked down to the only bidder for £126 — the
frames alone had cost him £24 ! Fifty years later
Mr Angerstein bought them for £1381. The
series is simply a comedy, or rather a tragedy,
of manners in six acts. In the first the ambitious
city merchant is seen purchasing in hard cash
a title for his daughter and the prestige of an
alliance with the house of the blue-blooded,
gouty earl. Meanwhile the foppish young lord
turns his back upon his future bride and takes
snuff with an ostentatious affectation of indif-
ference. The merchant's daughter with equal
listlessness divides her attention between twid-
dling her wedding ring on her handkerchief and
listening to the amusing asides of the amiable
lawyer. The next scene presents us with a
glimpse of the married life begun under such
unpromising auspices — the family breakfast on
a morning following a night which the earl's
n8
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son has spent in debauchery and his wife in
gambling, the steward retiring from the scene
in disgust with a sheaf of unpaid bills in his
hand. The husband is then seen visiting a quack
doctor and a procuress, while the countess amuses
herself in her dressing-room with the gay lawyer,
now on terms of considerable intimacy, and a
circle of opera-singers, musicians and fashionable
acquaintances. Then follow the earl's discovery
of his wife's infidelity and his fatal duel with
the villain of the piece, the rascally lawyer. In
the last scene the widowed countess is back in
her father's house in the city. She has taken
poison after hearing of the execution of her lover.
Meanwhile the merchant with his habitual
prudence is careful to remove the wedding ring
from her finger. Thus we are left to reflect upon
the awful consequences of a mariage de convenance !
" Other pictures we look at, — his we read,"
said Charles Lamb of Hogarth's work, a criticism
quite literally true of this series. In every picture
the spectator is invited to scrutinise written or
printed inscriptions of one kind or another, which
help to tell the story — the earl's pedigree, the
marriage contract and the mortgage deeds in
the first scene, the bills and receipt and " Hoyle
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on Whist" in the second, the ticket for the
masquerade on the evening of the duel, the
broadsheet giving "Counsellor Silvertongue's
last dying speech." The painter crosses the t's
and dots the i's of his story, anxious lest you
should miss a single one of the details by which
he forces home his moral. It is his insistence
upon a moral that distinguishes him from his
predecessors of the Dutch school of genre to
which his work is naturally allied. Their attitude
was one of a serene and comfortable acceptance
of life, a sensuous delight in the colours and
textures and surfaces of things, which rendered
them more attentive to the pictorial rather than
the emotional qualities of the human figures they
chose to place in the pattern of their pictures.
But Hogarth was more interested in men and
women than in paint, and what interested him
most in men and women was character and morals.
He aimed at doing in painting what Richardson
and Smollett were doing in literature. " I have
endeavoured to treat my subject as a dramatic
writer," he said. " My picture is my stage, my
men and woemn my players, who by means of
certain actions and gestures are to exhibit a
dumb show."
120
•_
Lord Heathfield
Reynolds
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And how vital, significant and instinct with
intelligence these gestures are ! Could bodily
attitude be more intimately expressive of char-
acter than in the pompous pose of the gout-
ridden peer, acerb and splenetic, in the lounging,
reckless indifference of the young lord in the
breakfast scene, in the stolid docility of the
young girl at the quack doctor's ? And was the
moment of death ever realised with such intensity
as in the husband's dying swoon after the duel ?
There is never anything artificial in Hogarth's
figures, no hint of the model — one and all they are
observed from life and bear the authentic stamp
of truth. In scarcely a less degree than Velazquez,
Hogarth possesses that special faculty of genius
which consists in giving to the sitter an air
of being taken by the painter unawares and
observed in the natural performance of a char-
acteristic act.
If there were any danger of losing sight of
the painter in the moralist we have only to look
for a moment at the masterly portraits of his
servants (1874) and The Shrimp Girl (11 62) to be
assured that Hogarth had nothing to learn from
any master of his own day about the handling
of paint. Of the latter picture Sir Claude Phillips
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has said, "This is a veritable study of nature,
pris sur le vif, an instantaneous impression of
humanity, in a fleeting moment of complete
physical activity, which has never been surpassed,
even by the most magically dexterous of the
higher Impressionists of to-day ; and over and
above all this, it has a salt savour of the sea,
a true national flavour which renders it in its
way unique."
From Hogarth, who laughed before Raphael,
and said of himself that " he was so profane as
to admire Nature before Art" to Sir Joshua
Reynolds with his care for the grand style and
his insistent advice " Study the old masters," we
seem to pass from the real to the ideal. Hogarth
demanded the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth— except perhaps occasionally a
little manipulation of fact in the interest of pub-
lic morals ; for the industrious apprentice does
not always succeed in marrying his master's
beautiful daughter and becoming Lord Mayor
of London, nor do all manages de convenance
invariably end in disaster. Reynolds, however,
could be guilty of a little gentle falsehood,
"just enough to make all men noble, all women
beautiful." But it was his good fortune that
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almost all his women were beautiful to begin
with, and most of his men noble — noble, that is
to say, with that peculiarly eighteenth-century
stamp of nobility which speaks the good breeding
of the body rather than of the soul.
It is no disparagement of Reynolds' genius to
say that he was fortunate in being born in the
England of the eighteenth century. Historians
tell us that the fortunes of the landed gentry
at that time were established upon the humble
turnip, the introduction of which, by making
agriculture for the first time a highly profitable
industry, doubled the landlord's rent roll. The
stately Georgian homes of England — seats would
be the more fitting term — presiding over the
tamed grandeur of their landscape gardens, rose
in every county. A stream of pictures and works
of art began to flow into them from Holland and
Italy. They formed a fitting setting for that
society which has so deeply imprinted its
characteristics upon English art and literature,
a society founded upon a decent affluence,
possessing elevated notions of style and taste,
inheriting healthy traditions of sport and open-
air life, serene, self-confident, decorous, robust.
For the class that shared this happy existence
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one thing more was needful to complete its
felicity — that it should have its portrait painted.
And it is difficult to say which was the more
fortunate — the gentry in being able to command
the brush of Reynolds, or Reynolds himself in
finding at his hand the precise material most apt
for the expression of his own individual genius.
For Reynolds' genius was not strong enough
to sustain the eagle-pinioned flights of the
imagination. He could scarcely have breathed
with comfort in a more rarefied atmosphere than
that of the eighteenth century. Even when his
gaze was most intently fixed upon the ideal, he
needed to feel the stable and familiar earth
beneath his feet. For what was extreme and in-
calculable in human nature he had no sympathy —
the fleshly zest and energy of Rubens was as much
outside the compass of his art as the spiritual in-
tensity of Rembrandt. But in the lords and ladies,
the squires and squiresses, who flocked to his
studio to have their portraits taken at twenty-five
guineas a head, he found just that middle term
of humanity, which was so exactly suited to his
powers of interpretation, a type which combined
bodily dignity and grace with a certain limitation,
it would be unfair to call it vulgarity, of mind.
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As a perfect instance of Sir Joshua's way of
expressing the particular facts of life in the
general terms of art, take The Graces decorating
a Statue oj Hymen (79). The circumstances that
each of the three beautiful daughters of Sir
William Montgomery did exceedingly well for
herself in that marriage market of the period
which was conducted on such sound business
principles is here clothed with the graceful
sentiment of a classical idyll. The note of reality
is deftly transposed into the key of the ideal.
The British landscape garden is made for the
moment to wear the aspect of pastoral Greece.
This sacrifice of local and particular truth in the
effort to secure a possibly artificial dignity
offended the honest soul of James Smetham.
"Oh, that the three celebrated beauties had
been winding silk," he exclaimed, " or shooting
at targets, or even occupied, as it is said one
fine lady who sat to Reynolds, was 'eating beef-
steaks'!" Hut Reynolds always eliminated the
beefsteak.
" I will go down to posterity on the hem of your
ladyship's garment," said the courtly Sir Joshua, as
he signed his name at the bottom of the dress in
the charming portrait of Lady Cockburn and her
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children. Their ladyships have certainly come
down to posterity on the canvases of Sir Joshua.
Most of them still hang on the walls of the rooms
of their ancestral seats, but in addition to the
Three Graces and Lady Cockburn (2077) the Na-
tional Gallery possesses those two incomparable
types of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, Anne,
Countess Albemarle (1259), with her expression of
command and air as of one whose prestige
has never been questioned, and Mrs Musters,
Portrait of a Lady (891), serene and disdainful
in the cold beauty of her classic profile.
Of his portraits of men, those of Lord Heath-
jield (111) and Dr Johnson (887) are especially
characteristic of that quiet nobility with which
Reynolds invested his sitters. The bluff old soldier
of the right bull-dog breed who had held Gibraltar
for England against all comers stands up squarely
against a sky dark with battle smoke, tapping
the key of the fortress on his fingers, a very
personification of the defiant boast " What we
have we hold ! " The portrait of Dr Johnson
is a psychological study in paint. The mind
appears to be concentrated in argument, as
though the great lexicographer were bearing
down upon some luckless antagonist with a
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"Now, sir, what's your drift?" or, "Nay, sir,
this is paltry."
The fact that the art of Reynolds was ex-
clusively, and that of Gainsborough primarily, an
art of portraiture has tended to keep the bulk
of their work in the hands of private owners.
Neither of them are seen quite at their best at
Trafalgar Square. We miss the Nelly O'Brien
of Sir Joshua and the Blue Boy of his rival. But
we are well content to measure Gainsborough's
genius by his achievement in the portrait of
Mrs Siddons (683). In his portrait of the actress
as the Tragic Muse, painted in the same year,
Reynolds forced the note of tragedy by imposing
upon her a tremendous dramatic gesture ; Gains-
borough paints her in the easy pose of a morning
call and lets the tragedian in her speak simply
by her presence. Severely majestic, her expression
gives credence to the reported assertion of one
of her admirers — " One would as soon think of
making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury."
Yet it is possible to discriminate between the
dignity of Gainsborough and that of Reynolds.
The dignity of Gainsborough's sitters seems to
partake of a more spiritual quality, expressing
not so much the consciousness of outward rank
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as the secure possession of the inward soul.
Moreover usually, as in this portrait, it is misted
over with a breath of dreamy melancholy.
Gainsborough, who was never so much at his ease
in the world as Reynolds, seems to have been
sensitive to a note of sadness and regret in
human nature which his more successful rival
never overheard, and doubtless he lent to his
sitters, whether they possessed it or not, some-
thing of the colour of his own temperament. We
observe it even in the wistful reticent face of
the older child in The Painter s Daughters (1811),
and still more markedly in his portrait of the
same daughter painted many years later, Miss
Gainsborough (1482).
The portrait of Mrs Siddons illustrates in
a very individual manner the technical as well
as the emotional qualities of the painter. Here
again the contrast with Reynolds is obvious. In
place of the Venetian splendour and golden glow
of Reynolds we have the greenish pallor of the
cold keys in which Gainsborough delighted to
compose. With this picture before us we are
willing for once to go the whole length of
Ruskin's superlative and declare Gainsborough
the finest colourist since Rubens. The technique
128
Mrs. Siodons
t "rahisborottsh
Mrs. Sidhons
Lawrence
THE BRITISH SCHOOL
is curiously modern, almost impressionist, in
appearance. The broad decorative treatment
of the striped silk dress ; the delicacy of its
texture ; the refinement of the drawing ; the
ease and lightness of the handling which give
an effect of happy spontaneity ; these qualities
lend the picture a distinction and charm unsur-
passed by any portrait of the English school.
Possibly the impression of spontaneity is deceptive,
for that the painter had trouble with the face
we know from his irritable exclamation, " Damn
it, madam, there is no end to your nose!" How
far Gainsborough could fall below his own level
we are painfully aware when we turn from this
brilliant piece of painting to the vapid and
uninspired Musidora bathing her Feet (308).
To their successors, Romney, Raeburn, Opie,
Hoppner, Lawrence, the two masters of English
portraiture bequeathed their tradition of style
but not their genius. Romney's portraits of Mrs
Mark Currie (1651) and The Parson's Daughter
(1068) reveal his skill in a certain swift abridg-
ment of feminine charm. The powdery cloud
of hair, the soft complexion, the childlike
archness of expression, the free flimsy draperies,
all the obvious and superficial graces of woman,
I 129
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he recorded with an easy, agreeable touch,
although at times showing cheap and thin
in comparison with Sir Joshua's. But he was
unable to penetrate beneath the surface.
Emotional rather than intellectual in his outlook,
he did not give his sitters character and soul ;
sometimes, as in the sad case of Mrs Currie, not
even bones. For a great part of his life he was,
like Nelson, under the spell of that professional
charmer Emma Lyon, alias Lady Hamilton, " the
divine lady," as he called her, " I cannot give
her any other epithet, for I think her superior
to all womankind." Here we see her as a
bacchante in a " vivid sketch, large, streaky,
splashy — a successful excited beginning — a rosy-
cheeked girl, with golden-brown hair, the head
inclined on the right shoulder, the moistened
teeth white and a-gleam between red lips —
a canvas of cream and rose colour" (31 2).1
Lawrence's study of Mrs Siddons contrasts
significantly with Gainsborough's portrait. The
sentiment of the earlier picture is here melted
into sentimentality. Her melancholy has become
more tearful, her austere beauty mere prettiness.
Lawrence was essentially the painter of the
1 F. Wedmore.
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Byronic era. His women are ardent, melting,
romantic — often in spite of themselves. Even
that devout young Methodist, Miss Caroline Fry,
had to submit to being gypsified. The young
painter was the prodigy of the art world of his
age. Lawrence's father declined the Duke of
Devonshire's offer to send him to Rome, affirming
that " his son's talent required no cultivation."
" His studio before he was twelve years old was,"
we are told, " the favourite resort of the beauty
and fashion and taste of Bath : young ladies
loved to sit and converse with the handsome
prodigy, men of taste and vertu purchased his
crayon heads, which he drew in vast numbers,
and carried them far and near, even into foreign
lands, to show as the work of the boy-artist of
Britain." Even his mature work in its extreme
facility and lack of depth seems still to retain
a suggestion of the infant prodigy. For some
justification of his claim to be " the second Rey-
nolds" we must look to his portraits of men. John
Julius Angerstein (129) is a solid piece of painting
which mere cleverness alone could never have
achieved.
If, as Ruskin said, the history of English
landscape art begins with the name of Richard
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Wilson, the beginning was very much of the
nature of a false start, He is not so much the
forerunner of Crome and Constable as the pupil
of Poussin and Salvator. Judging him solely
by his works we should scarcely recognise him
as an Englishman. He found himself when he
found Italy, but he never found England at all.
His idea of what landscape ought to be is well
exemplified in his masterpiece, The Destruction
of Niobe's Children (110), in which Apollo, riding
the storm, is seen shooting lightnings at a group
of cowering mortals. The dignity of a landscape
was always enhanced, according to the Wilsonian
formula, when it became the scene of mythological
activities or classical reminiscence. In treating
a simpler theme, such as The Villa of Maecenas,
at Tivoli (108), he aims at dignity by forcing a con-
trast between bituminous, coal-black shadows and
an exaggerated, unearthly light. His painting
is virile and his colour frequently excellent, but
it was his misfortune to lack the simplicity of
eye and mind that is content with nature as it
is. When George III. gave him a commission
for a picture of Kew Gardens, he translated the
scene to a Southern latitude and ennobled it with
classical architecture. The king returned it
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with the terse comment, " It is not Kew."
Opinion in general agreed with the royal verdict.
Whatever else Wilson's landscape might be, it
was not England.
With Gainsborough came the reaction against
the classical landscape ; in place of gods and
heroes, ruined temples and the glow of Italy,
merely girls with pigs, market carts jolting along
country lanes, cattle drinking at streams, and the
cold grey-greens of Suffolk. The change was
not merely in the accessories, but in the whole
attitude of the painter to nature. Gainsborough
did not seek to reconstruct the natural scene
on a more noble model ; he simply lay in wait,
as it were, for the soul of the landscape. In
The Market Cart (80) we are at the very heart
of rural England. Although Ruskin complained
that the foliage was put in with meaningless
touches which made it impossible to label the
trees with botanical precision, there is here
a convincing fidelity to the deeper underlying
truth of landscape. Still more intimate is the
feeling of hushed solemnity in The Watering
Place (109). It is painted in that same minor
key in which so many of his portraits are pitched.
Constable remarked this melancholy mood of
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Gainsborough's landscapes. " On looking at
them/' he said, " we find tears in our eyes, and
know not what brings them." The Wood Scene
(925), known as Gainsborough's Forest, from the
title of the engraving, has a more prosaic
character. It suffers moreover from a division
of interest between the road and the stream,
the perspective of each carrying the eye back
in separate directions — a loss of unity character-
istic of the English school, which in its revolt
against the classical landscape tended to ignore
the amenities of composition. And the eye
searches in vain to discover the realities which
correspond to the reflections in the water.
The acquisition of the Poringland OaA-(2674)in
1911 completed the Gallery's magnificent group of
pictures by John Crome the Elder. He knew
trees as a man knows the faces of his friends, and
this kingly oak, robust playfellow of the sun and
wind, has the close individuality of a human
portrait. Loving and understanding atmosphere
and light as well as any of the French Impres-
sionists, unlike them he never sacrificed the
essential and permanent qualities of objects for
the sake of capturing the fleeting atmospheric
conditions under which they are seen. But he
134
THE BRITISH SCHOOL
is greatest when he surrenders the particular
incidents of landscape to a broad summary of
earth and sky, as in the large Mousehold Heath
(689). Here there is no subject but space, air
and solitude. Landscape is reduced to its two
elemental constituents, earth and sky ; but what
absorbing, almost dramatic, interest arises from
this simple opposition of the ribbed and sweeping
heath with the vaporous pearl-pink cloud and the
soft depth of filmy blue. Although the scene is
precise in its localisation, it is in a sense no longer
just Norfolk, but a broad presentment of that
primeval earth and heaven between which the
life of man is lived. Repose and a reticent dignity
it derives from the fine sweep of the bounding
lines. Wherever he could draw a line Crome could
create dignity. Hence the significance of his
death-bed advice to his son : " John, my boy, if
your subject is only a pigsty — dignify it." The
trace of a long cut is visible in the centre of the
canvas stretching from the top of the picture to
the bottom. This is the result of the vandalism of
a picture dealer who, doubtless thinking that two
small Cromes were worth more than one large
one, divided the picture into two parts. The two
halves were sold separately, but fortunately they
135
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
both came into the hands of a collector who
reunited them, and thus saved posterity from an
irreparable loss.
The magic of Crome is perhaps even more
striking in the desolate grandeur of his Welsh
Slate Quarries (1037), a dreary bare hillside,
swathed with drifting shreds of cloud. Grandeur
of this sort, springing directly from the
simple verities of earth, reduces the artificial
dignity of Wilson's Niobe's Children to mere
rodomontade. Something in the picture — the
impressiveness of line, the economy of means,
the broad wash of colour — recalls the Japanese,
suggesting kinship with that other supreme
master of landscape, Hokusai.
" I feel more than ever convinced," Constable
wrote in 1803, "that one day or other I shall
paint well ; and that even if it does not turn to
my advantage during my lifetime, my pictures
will be handed down to posterity." Time has
verified his prediction, for it is safe to say that
to-day The Haywain (1207) and The Cornfield (130)
are the best-known and the best-loved of all
English landscapes. They touch a chord in the
popular affection which few other works can reach.
They have an essentially national character. Look-
136
The Cornfield
Constable
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THE BRITISH SCHOOL
ing at these vast breathing trees, at the dewy
greenness of the grass, at the blusteriug cloudy
skies — "great-coat weather" Ruskin called it — at
the brief cold bursts of sunshine, at the clear, sky-
scattering streams, we feel that this is just that
cool, fresh, robust garden which is England, " this
other Eden, demi-paradise." Not only is the sub-
ject English, but also the way of seeing it, the
representation of it, is marked by certain qualities
that we are pleased to regard as typically English,
sinoerity, independence, vigour — as Constable
himself expressed it in homely phrase, "it is
without fal-de-lal and fiddle-de-dee." "When I
sit down before a scene of nature, pencil or brush
in hand," he said, "my first care is to forget that
I have ever seen a picture before." The fact that he
forgot pictures when he looked at nature accounts
for the absence in his own landscapes of that old
convention of the classical landscape, the brown
tree. It is said that Constable once found Sir
George Beaumont in difficulties over a landscape.
His trouble was that he could not make up his
mind where to put his brown tree, without which
tradition taught that no landscape was complete.
Constable simply took him to the window and
showed him that there was no brown tree in
137
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
nature, a fact which he had until then not taken
into account. Constable seems to have felt that
the study of the old masters might tend to repress
the individuality of the artist and perpetuate the
tyranny of tradition, and this fear no doubt
led him to doubt the wisdom of establishing
a National Gallery of pictures when the idea was
first projected.
Four characteristic works illustrate the naive
simplicity and truth of George Morland's scenes
of rustic life. The best of them, The Inside of a
Stable (1030), which is usually considered to be
his masterpiece, shows his skill in grouping
animals and figures in the easy casual positions of
ordinary life, and his almost intuitive know-
ledge of the horse. The extraordinary fluency
of his touch gives the picture the freedom
and spontaneity of a sketch.
Turner occupies a unique position in his
relations with the National Gallery. " We have
had, living with us, and painting for us, the
greatest painter of all time," said Ruskin, in
one of his more than usually uncritical outbursts
of enthusiasm, " a man with whose supremacy of
power no intellect of past ages can be put in
comparison for a moment." Turner was not in-
138
THE BRITISH SCHOOL
frequently embarrassed by Ruskin's superlatives,
but at the same time he had a confident assurance
of the greatness of his own genius. The fastidious
precautions which he took to perpetuate his own
fame after his death show at the same time his
belief that he was great enough to deserve to be
remembered together with a fear lest posterity
might forget him unless he himself took good care
that it should not. With this view he left a
thousand pounds for the erection of a monument
to himself in St Paul's Cathedral, and he be-
queathed all his finished pictures to the nation
" provided that a room or rooms are added to the
present National Gallery, to be, when erected,
called Turner's Gallery." Two of his pictures
were given, as has already been mentioned, on
condition that they should hang side by side with
two of Claude's. This bequest amounted to more
than a hundred oil paintings and some nineteen
thousand drawings. The work of classifying the
drawings and arranging a selection of them for
exhibition was undertaken by Ruskin. The bulk
of them remain in the basement of the building
in Trafalgar Square, where selections of them are
exhibited in rotation ; some are lent to provincial
galleries. The stipulation for the addition of a
*39
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
" Turner Gallery" was in time duly carried out,
and in 186l all the pictures were hung in the
National Gallery. Within the last few years,
however, a new Turner wing has been added to
the National Gallery of British Art on the Mill-
bank Embankment, better known as the Tate
Gallery, where the greater part of the Turner
Collection has now been removed. About a score
of pictures, representing his early, middle and
later periods, have been left at Trafalgar Square.
The Boat's Crew recovering an Anchor (481) and
the Orange Merchantman going to Pieces on the Bar
(501) are examples of the grey-brown sea-pieces
of his first period, inspired by Vandevelde and
the Dutch sea painters. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
(5l6), a glorious summary of Italy, shows his art
in its maturity, when he had given up emulating
the older masters and, unmindful of schools and
formulas, let the light and colour of the actual
world illuminate his canvases. And of his later
eolden visions of a more dreamlike world than
this there remain the " Sun of Venice " going to Sea
(535) and Returning from the Ball (544), their
splendour faded, but beautiful in their decay.
140
INDEX
Angerstein, John Julius, 13
Angelico, Fra : The Resurrection (663), 32
Armstrong, Sir William, 59, 63, 65, 68, 96
Beaumont, Sir George, 13, 14, 137
Bellini, Giovanni, 45 ; Chrisfs Agony in the Garden (726),
46 ; Death of St Peter Martyr (812), 46 ; Doge Loredano
(189), 47 ; Virgin and Child (280), 47
Botticelli, Sandro, 35 ; Head of a Young Man (626), 35 ;
Mars and Venus (915), 35 ; Madonna and Child (275),
36 ; Nativity (1034), 36
Boudin : Harbour at Trouville (2078), 1 14
Boxall, Sir William, 20-21
Burton, Sir Frederic, 21-22
Canaletto : View on the Grand Canal (163), 55 ; View of
Venice (127), 55
Carpaccio, 43
Catena : Warrior adoring the Infant Christ (234), 48 ; St
Jerome in his Study (694), 48
Chardin : Still Life (1258), no
Cimabue : Madonna (565), 30
Claude, 14, 106 ; Embarkation of Queen of Sheba (14), 107
Constable: The Haywain (1207), 136; The Corttfi eld (130),
136
Corot : The Bent Tree (2625), 113 ; Wood Gatherers (2627),
"3
Correggio ; Education of Cupid (10), 53; Virgin of the
Basket (23), 53
Crivelli, 44 ; Annunciation (739), 45
Crome, John: Poringland Oak (2674), 134; Mousehold
Heath (689), 135; Welsh Slate Quarries (1037), 136
l4I
INDEX
Cuyp : Evening (53), 72 ; Large Dort (961), 72
Diaz : Sunny Days in the Forest (2058), 113 ; The Storm
(2632), 113
Dou, Gerard : The Poulterer's Shop (825), 68
Duccio : Transfiguration (1330), 31
Durer : Portrait of his Father (1938), 88J
Dyck, Anthony van: Charles the First (1172), 86;
Cornelius van der Geest (52), 87
Eastlake, Sir Charles, 19, 20
Eyck, Jan van : Jan Arnolfini and Wife (186), 77
Fantin-Latour, 114
Francesca, Piero della : Baptism of Christ (665), 39 ;
Nativity (908), 39
Gainsborough : Mrs Siddons (683), 127 ; The Painter's
Daughters (181 1), 128; Miss Gainsborough (1482), 128 ;
Musidora (308), 129; The Market Carl '(80), 133; The
Watering Place (109), 133; Wood Scene (925), 134
Giorgione, 43, 48
Giotto, school of: Two Apostles (276), 31
Goya: Dr Peral (1951), 103; Isabel Corbo de Porcel
(1473), 103
Greco, El : Christ driving the Traders out of the Temple
(1457). 93 5 St Jerome (1122), 93
Greuze, no ; Girl with an Apple (1020), in
Guardi: S. Maria della Salute (209S), 56; View through an
Archway (1058), 56
Hals, Frans : Family Portrait (2285), 70; Man's Portrait
(1251), 70
Hobbema : The Avenue (830), 7 1
Hogarth, William, 117; Marriage a la Mode (113-118),
118 ; Servants (1374), 121 ; Shrimp Girl (1162), 121
Holbein, 88; Ambassadors {1314), 89; Christina of Denmark
(2475). 90
Holroyd, Sir Charles, 23, 29, 45
142
INDEX
Hooch, Pieter de, 64 ; A Dutch Interior (834), 65
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 130; /. /. Anger stein (129), 131;
Mrs Siddons (785), 131
Lenain : Portrait Group (1425), 109
Mabuse : A Man and Wife (1689), 79; Adoration of the
Kings (2790), 80
Masaccio, 31
Metsu : Music Lesson (839), 66
Michael Angelo : Entombment (790), 38 ; Madonna and
Child, (809), 39
Moretto, 54
Morland, George : Inside of a Stable (1030), 138
Moroni, 54
Murillo, 101 ; A Boy Drinking (1286), 102
Peel, Sir Robert, 57-59
Perugino : Virgin and Child (28S), 40
Phillips, Sir Claude, 121
Pitti Collection, 18
Pollaiuolo: .SV Sebastian (292), 34
Poussin, Nicholas, 106
Poynter, Sir Edward, 22, 49, 77
Raphael: Ansidei Madonna (1171), 21, 40; Julius II.
(27), 42
Rembrandt : J Toman taken in Adultery (45), 60 ; Adoration
of the Shepherds (47), 61 ; portraits, 62-63
Rembrandt, school of: Christ blessing Little Children (757),
21
Reni, Guido, 15
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 50, 122-126; Graces decorating a Statue
of Hymen (79), 125 ; Lady Cockburn (2077), 125 ; Anne,
Countess Albemarle (1259), 126; Mrs Musters (891),
126; Dr Johnson (887), 126; Lord Heathfi eld (in), 126
Romney : Mrs Mark Currie (165 1 ), 129; I'he Parson's
Daughter (1068), 129 ; Lady Hamilton (312), 130
M3
INDEX
Rubens : Abduction of Sabine Women (38), 81 ; Triumph of
Silenus (853), 82 ; Blessings of Peace (46), 83 ; Chapeau
de Poil (852), 83 ; Chateau de Stein (66), 84
Ruskin, 15, 25, 27,47, 71, 138
Ruysdael, 72
Steen, Jan : Interior (1378), 67
Strong, Arthur, 61 , 71
Terburg : Peace of Milnster (896), 68
Tiepolo, 43
Tintoretto : Origin of the Milky Way (1314)1 53
Titian : Bacchus and Ariadne (35), 49 ; Portrait of Ariosto
(1944). 51
Turner, 138-140; Dido building Carthage (498), 107
Uccello, Paulo ; Battle of Sanf Egidio (583), 33
Velazquez, 95; Wild Boar Hunt (197), 97; Philip IV.
(745), 99 ; Venus and Cupid (2057), 100 ; Las Lanzas,
33> 68
Veronese: Family of Darius (294), 51; allegories, 52 ; Vision
of St Helena (1041), 52
Vinci, Leonardo da : Our Lady of the Rocks (1093), 37
Wilson, Richard, 131 ; Niobe's Children (no), 132; Villa
of Mcecenas (108), 132
ZURBARAN : Franciscan Monk (230), 94 ; Adoration of the
Shepherds (232), 95 ; Lady as St Margaret (1930), 95
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
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