Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/51

1857.] Italian masters, and talking about their "Correggios and Raphaels and stuff."

From Hogarth to Sir Joshua Reynolds is a wide step. Sir Joshua is well represented here by some thirty pictures; and Gainsborough is at his side with perhaps half as many. If Sir Joshua had not been a man of genius, he would have been ruined by his academic principles. He laid down rules which he constantly violated. He praised the Bolognese masters, and advised all students of Art in Italy to study at Bologna; but he did not confine himself to the study of other men's works, but sometimes gave himself, with honest sincerity and affection, to the study of Nature; and thus it is that it becomes hard to draw the line of praise between some of his pictures and some of those by Gainsborough, and to say which are the best. Gainsborough was no academician; he did not believe in conventionalities. When Sir Joshua laid down as a rule that blue was bad as a prevailing color in pictures, Gainsborough painted his famous Blue Boy, and made one of the most charming portraits and pleasantest pictures that had ever been painted in England. Look at Sir Joshua's delightful, winning Nelly O'Brien,—what a happy picture of a girl!—and then look at Gainsborough's Mrs. Graham, with her exquisite, perhaps even too exquisite, beauty; and see, not which of the artists was the best, for that it is hard to see, but how great both were as students and renderers of human nature. One of the best of Reynolds's portraits is that of Foote, the actor. He is leaning over a chair, and his laughing face is looking out from the canvas, as if he were watching the effect of one of his own most brilliant and easy jokes. But Sir Joshua does not compare with Gainsborough in landscape; there the lover of Nature had the advantage over the lover of Poussin and Claude. The famous picture of Puck, which Lord Fitzwilliam lately bought at Mr. Rogers's sale for the extravagant sum of nine hundred and eighty guineas, is here for all eyes to see how far the imagination of the President of the Royal Academy differed from that of Shakspeare.

But the principles which Sir Joshua laid down, though they did not ruin his own works, did much to ruin those of the next generation of painters. There was still the struggle between the painters by rule and according to convention, and the painters of truth as found in Nature. But the painters of Nature were in a minority so small as to be powerless against the prevailing current. English Art seemed to be running down; cold formalisms, classicalities, extravagances, affectations, imitations, "high art," occupied the field almost to the exclusion of better things. West, Fuseli, Northcote, Barry, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Haydon, Maclise, and Sir Charles Eastlake form a famous line of painters who have been admired, but whose works have little value except as warnings, and as showing into what errors a false method and want of recognition of the foundation and the end of Art may lead men not destitute of ability.

But while these men had their day, the school of the lovers of Nature as seen in the external world was making irregular progress. The overwhelming pressure of conventional traditions is shown most forcibly, however, by the fact that the great leader of this school of the students of landscape nature, the man to whom was given the power to see and to represent Nature in all the changing glories and beauties of her ceaselessly varying moods, the man who knew the value of truth and set his desires upon it accordingly,—that this man should have been for years of his life kept down to the imitation of and competition with the works of painters of previous centuries who were supposed to have painted landscapes. But it was Pegasus running a race with cart-horses. He had reached the goal which they had never aspired after. There are nineteen pictures of Turner's here at Manchester; some of them among his noblest works. Here