Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/22

 natural fact—a trim town, a green meadow, woods and waters unstirred by the wind, a distant blue peak, and, almost always, a space of liquid air beyond. Yet the landscape element is kept strictly subordinate to the main matter of the picture, both in tone, colour, and proportion, while the technical treatment is as simple and precise as that employed for the figures. This held good right up to the end of the fifteenth century. Then the conditions are occasionally reversed, and figure-painting with a landscape background develops into the landscape with figures. Thus in the work of Titian, who was the first great master to cultivate both branches of the art side by side, we find landscape and figures treated alike, without any radical difference in technique.

The method of Titian, which consisted of a first solid painting (probably tempera) of a broad and simple kind, followed by elaborate glazes with transparent or semi-transparent pigment, was admirably adapted for the breadth of mass and richness of colour at which he aimed. Being a thoroughly professional painter, he realized exactly the limitations and advantages of a method which enabled him to reduce his interpretations of natural effect to the unity of tone which had already become a recognised condition of pictorial success; and if his Italian successors and imitators carried the reduction to the point of dulness, he can hardly be held responsible for their failure.

Certain foreigners, at any rate, understood him better. The influence of Velasquez upon landscape has been slight, because his landscapes are few in number, and their beauty is not of an obtrusive order. The genius of Rubens was less modest. The Autumn in our National Gallery will serve to show how he introduced many of the qualities which he admired in Titian, into the oil-method characteristic of his own countrymen. The shadows which hold the composition together are painted thinly in rich brown upon a luminous ground, and into them while still moist the lights and half lights are swept with a touch that is free to audacity, and with a most skilfully varied impasto. The scheme of colour retains more than a hint of his Flemish origin, though the hues are dexterously broken and interchanged, and harmonized at the last by a strong warm glaze. This tradition was altered but slightly by the suave accomplishment of Van Dyck, and passed into English art through the gentle genius of Gainsborough. 2