Chapter VI: Part 6

Generally, it may be noted, the full-lengths of men--sometimes, also, the full-lengths of women--are less attractive than the half-lengths and the busts, though whatever could be done by any artist to overcome the difficulty of making the full-length interesting, could be done by Gainsborough, since he was a master of draperies, and skilled, as a pupil of Gravelot’s should have been, in the secrets of dignified and gracious carriage. But, to remain for the moment with the men’s portraits, one’s admiration of the elegance and harmony of Tenducci’s portrait must be in excess of any feeling that can rightly be prompted by the ‘Garrick.’ This, again, is the portrait of an artist--Gainsborough’s sympathies were with artists--and Tenducci is said to have ‘warbled so divinely.’ And then, to take an instance from the women’s portraits, and to single out a full-length figure, in which the face is modelled with exceptional exactness, and is one, too, of peculiar refinement, take the portrait of Lady Sheffield, with her aquiline nose and her almond-shaped eyes--even here the importance of the countenance is a little effaced by the brilliant light on the showy drapery of the skirt. No one could assert that, for real charm, that picture--masterly as it is in its own kind--is equal to any one of half a dozen busts or half-lengths in the same Gallery. But, on the other hand, the ‘Sir Bate Dudley,’ ‘skilled in the nice conduct of a clouded cane,’ is an instance of Gainsborough’s occasional triumph, even with the full-length male figure; and the ‘Mrs. Graham,’ at Edinburgh, is one of the most fascinating full-length portraits of a woman that has been painted since the days of the Venetians. Furthermore, three more quite masterly full-length male portraits are in the Grosvenor Gallery itself: they are first, those that are lent by the Queen, the portrait of Colonel St. Leger, the portrait of ‘Fischer’ the musician, and last, the familiar ‘Blue Boy,’ a work directed possibly at the theories of Sir Joshua and inspired by the practice of Van Dyck.

As one looks over the subjects of Gainsborough’s portraits, one understands in part how it was that, comparing them with Sir Joshua’s, or perhaps even with Romney’s, so few of them were engraved. Romney was, above all things, seductive: he saw Lady Hamilton--or when not Lady Hamilton, then some one who was almost equally pretty--in everything, and the public liked what he saw. Sir Joshua was a courtier, careful to be on the best of terms with the great world. Gainsborough courted nobody, and the world talked much less about him. Though, after the lapse of years, he succeeded in getting a hundred guineas for a full-length picture, and moved, without imprudence, from the cottage at Ipswich, rented at six pounds, first to the Circus at Bath, and then to the west wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, he was never really in his own time Sir Joshua’s rival in the public favour. And much of his best work in Portraiture--over and above that work in landscape which confessedly engaged his choice--was devoted to the record of people of the artistic rather than the fashionable world; people of professions the members of which were not in those days motioned to the velvet of the social sward.

We have already spoken of more than one instance--and ‘Giardini,’ the fiddler, is another--of such a natural selection which governs Gainsborough’s art. It is as characteristic of him in portraiture as it is of Watteau in _genre_ pieces and gallant pastorals. But there is a little canvas, the portrait of an unknown Mrs. Carr, which holds its own either against portraits of people from the artistic world or people from Georgian ‘Society.’ It is curiously natural and refined in expression, exquisitely suggestive of elegant carriage, though so small a portion of the figure is seen, and as a piece of flesh-painting, it is unsurpassed by any of the more famous examples of Gainsborough’s skill. Who was ‘Mrs. Carr’? And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some further interest in her than that which is aroused in any qualified observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most. Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enriched _bourgeois_, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not care to penetrate. Where he knew and liked, he painted with delight. He was so profoundly impressionable: what he enjoyed stirred him: if somebody played the fiddle particularly well, tears of rapture stood on Gainsborough’s cheek.

His wife, who was in her youth a rose and brown coloured beauty, and whose countenance was long afterwards lustrous enough under the becoming grey of her powdered hair, Gainsborough painted several times, and always with distinction and conspicuous artistry. His handling of the subject is best in the portrait numbered 175--a worthy companion to his own sensitive and high-bred countenance (No. 185). And his portraits of his daughters--his only children--are at the least satisfying. One is a group--the two together; another is a half-length of Mrs. Fischer; another, again, a half-length of the brighter personality who remained ‘Miss Gainsborough.’ There is some likeness between the two young women, in the general contour of the head and in the fulness of the under-lip. ‘Miss Gainsborough,’ with her clear brown eyes, delicate eyebrows, compact and intelligent forehead, is the greater beauty; but to Mrs. Fischer there belongs a winning expression of pathetic reverie. Both are felt to be the true daughters of their father: the one by her possession of the gaiety and fire of temper which characterised Gainsborough in his happiest times; the other by her obvious inheritance of what proved more than her share of Gainsborough’s keen perception of the sadness of so much of human fortune. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was almost wholly intellectual and ‘practical,’ who lived on the outside of things, had nothing of Gainsborough’s sense of profundity and pathos. And, in so far as he had nothing of this, he was, in the essentials of character, the less of an artist. For Goethe said--and when he said it he was uttering one of the deepest of his truths--‘To be artistic is to be serious.’

(_The Standard_, 1st and 6th January 1885.)

COTMAN

It remained for the Norwich Art Circle to hold, for the first time, an exhibition of the drawings of an artist who was nothing less than a great master in water-colour, but whose place in the ranks of Art was for many a year, by the general public, not so much contested as ignored. Cotman was born a few years after Turner. Possessed of a sensibility as keen, but of less tremendous vitality, he died a few years before him. Turner was amongst Cotman’s friends; not a ‘chum,’ perhaps, but an advocate, strenuous and judicious--and strenuous and judicious advocacy may claim to be called friendship. Had it not been for Turner, it is unlikely that the less-known artist would have received that post at King’s College which afforded him comfort, though not affluence, in the last years of his life. Like Dewint, Cotman taught drawing. But in London his connection was less influential than that of Dewint, whose usual fee of a guinea an hour was no doubt never reached by the draughtsman from Norwich. The appointment of drawing-master at King’s College was therefore very serviceable: the more so that Cotman’s original work, though it was produced with the enthusiasm and the untiring enjoyment, and the sweat of the brow besides, which in any art are the real artist’s equivalents or substitutes for mechanical diligence--Cotman’s original work, I say (like a little of Mozart’s best music), was produced ‘for himself and two friends.’ Even the connoisseur, as a rule, held back. The public? But can you for an instant expect the public to understand work which, frankly, makes no bid for its sympathies, which is never furnished ‘according to sample,’ which is bound to be itself and wholly fresh, and is content to be excellent? An intelligent criticism might perhaps have drummed into the big public, not the real sense, but at all events some tacit acceptance, of Cotman’s peculiar merit. But where was the intelligent criticism of 1820 and 1830? There was little critical writing then--at all events in the papers--that was either an influence or an art.

John Sell Cotman was born at Norwich on the 16th of May 1782. His father was a well-to-do haberdasher, established at that time in Cockey Lane, but afterwards, when able to retire from business, living in a villa at Thorpe, with a garden that looked on the river. Cotman himself drew the garden--and idealised it--in the last year of his life. His father survived him; dying very old--at eighty-four. Cotman died at sixty.

Whatever troubles there had been on the subject of Cotman’s trade or profession, they were got over by the simple process of his going his own way, and of his father’s forgiving him. The boy was educated at the grammar school, and at sixteen years old, after much discussion about his future--after the interposition of Opie, with the not very measured remark that the boy ‘had far better black shoes than be an artist’--young Cotman chose the less desirable of these unhappy alternatives, and, that he might be an artist, journeyed to London. A young man at that period, and especially a young man who was wishing to be a landscape painter, had little opportunity of artistic training, unless indeed it might be that best kind of training which consists in familiarity with people of mind, and with the works of art that bygone genius has produced, and with those natural scenes which, like the voice or the face of your friend, stimulate and enrich and endow with a new experience. Cotman in these things was happy. He was trained by the world, and by those lessons in noble by-past Art which he was so well fitted to receive. His own true taste, and the faculty of real development--which some of us call, like Wordsworth, ‘a leading from above: a something given’--made him independent of academic influence; and in his case no one undertook the academic task, and made the too-confident promise to turn into fine gold what is brass at the beginning, and must be brass to the end. Cotman was fine gold. He was, that is to say, an artist born, not manufactured.

At the hospitable house of Dr. Munro, in the Adelphi Terrace, the young man fell into association with a group of painters, most of whom were his seniors. At eighteen years old he exhibited six drawings at the Royal Academy, and while he was still extremely young, he presided over a little society--a sketching club, one may call it--of which Varley and Dr. Munro were members. At very moderate prices his drawings seem to have found a sale, and he began to make excursions into remote parts of the country--into Yorkshire and Lincolnshire--besides visiting his family at Norwich. It was either at Norwich or Yarmouth, in the first years of the century, that he made the acquaintance of Dawson Turner, the antiquary. That acquaintance became a friendship, and, to use the phrase of Charles Lamb in regard to such matters, ‘a friendship that answered.’ Dawson Turner was at once, and for many a year afterwards, a help to Cotman. And as a serious student--not only a rich dilettante--he knew that he gained as much as Cotman from their association. ‘We value him greatly,’ Dawson Turner wrote to Cotman’s father, very long after their first introduction, and when it was wanted to arouse the father to an understanding of Cotman’s position, and of his depressed state.

In November 1805 we find Cotman established in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, writing to Dawson Turner that he had been in Yorkshire and Durham all the autumn, ‘making many close copies of the fickle Dame Nature--copies,’ writes Cotman, not very elegantly, ‘consequently valuable on that account.’ A hope of settling in Norwich--of working, and founding a drawing-class there--was now growing upon him, and in 1806 it was accomplished. A young bachelor of four-and-twenty--personally a little extravagant, but taking his art very seriously--he possessed himself of an excellent house in Luckett’s Court, Wymer Street. I saw the house this summer. A dignified house, with gables of the Seventeenth Century, and much of the interior woodwork seemingly of the early Eighteenth. For six years Cotman lived there. There, was wrought almost all the best of his earlier art: Mr. J. J. Colman’s ‘St. Luke’s Chapel’; Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’ (from a yet earlier sketch); the same collector’s ‘Mousehold Heath’; my own ewe lamb, ‘Bishopgate Bridge’; and a mass of work besides--much of which, unquestionably, has been mislaid, neglected, ruined, forgotten.

The exhibition held at Norwich--to which I began by referring--gave us an excellent opportunity of really studying this rarer and earlier art. I am not thinking of the insignificant fact that there was to be seen there a puerile yet rather clever performance which dates from Cotman’s twelfth year; but to the assemblage of work of the early time when he was really an artist--from 1800, say, to 1812. What was the character of his labour then? With whom did he sympathise? Whom did he at all resemble? The influence of Turner and of Girtin is to be detected in some of the work of this period--in the noble architectural work, especially--and it is not in the slightest degree unlikely that, in his turn, Cotman exercised some influence over Turner; at a much later time I mean, when everyday sobriety sufficed for neither of them, and when Cotman, surely quite as much as Turner, led the way to revelries of colour. Between Cotman and Girtin there could be no such reciprocity of influence, for Girtin died, an accomplished master of water-colour, though less than thirty years old, in 1802, and Cotman was then but twenty.

Mr. Colman’s large and solid and sober drawing of ‘Durham’ (it has these qualities, and yet is, somehow, without charm) reminds me of an early Girtin; while a Girtin of the finer sort, just as simple, just as straightforward, yet with something of the later magic of the hand, is recalled by Mr. Reeve’s ‘Bridge over the Greta.’ A quiet realism; a sense of the picturesque, entertained but yet subdued; a composition, ordered, yet not seemingly artificial; a breadth that was never thereafter for a moment departed from--these are, perhaps, the characteristics of the mature and noble drawings of the earlier period, such as ‘St. Luke’s Chapel,’ ‘Bishopgate Bridge,’ and ‘Mousehold Heath.’ Wherever there is opportunity for it--as, in my ‘Bishopgate Bridge,’ in the yew-tree to the left and the slope of the bank to the river--there comes in Cotman’s sense of grace, his appreciation of style and of dignity, his avoidance of mere topography; but it is in Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’--thanks to the occasion of which the scene itself is lavish--that that sense of grace dominates, and the stately trees throw their shadows over the lawn by the water.

In 1812, Cotman removed to South Town, Yarmouth; Dawson Turner being, presumably, at the bottom of the change. The painter’s association with the interesting antiquary became more and more intimate. Purely architectural, or, as one might say, monumental, draughtsmanship was at this time a good deal occupying him. He was issuing at the moment the first part of the _Antiquities of Norfolk_. In the year 1817, he paid, on the advice of Dawson Turner, a first visit to Normandy. He went there again in 1819 and 1820; and, two years after the third visit, his _Architectural Antiquities of Normandy_ saw the light. It was not until 1838 that he produced the book which best represents the characteristics of his style--the book in which, fettered by no established task, his sense of elegance, his genius for composition in line and in light and shade, had free play--I mean, of course, his _Liber Studiorum_: soft ground-etchings of unquestioned force and charm. But at Yarmouth he had much to engage him. His range of subjects increased. There it was that he acquired the close knowledge of coast ‘effects’ and of marine architecture which made him, in addition to all his other capacities, so excellent a painter of the shore and sea.

It was in 1823, I think, that Cotman left Yarmouth: a married man in early middle age, with five young children. He did it to establish himself again at Norwich, hoping perhaps to sell his pictures better there, and expecting again to add to his group of pupils--he still went regularly and frequently to those who learnt of him at Yarmouth. This time it was only a house opposite the Bishop’s Palace--the address, ‘St. Martin’s at Palace’--that sufficed for Cotman’s needs, or Cotman’s ambitions. But before long, though he made no change, his mind suffered tortures from the costliness of his new abode, and the unremunerative character of the adventure. He went to the Dawson Turners in utter gloom, and then it was that his excellent friend wrote to him and to his father letters full of tact, wisdom, and feeling, pointing out to the well-to-do father that Cotman must really be relieved, and pointing out, to the now depressed and now exalted genius of a son, that his position, could he but face it, and retrench a little, was not by any means so bad. The existence of the letters on this subject allows us entrance into the intimacy of these housekeeping troubles, and of the troubles of mind that threatened to be more serious. But we do not get the end of the story. We can only suppose that Cotman’s father, who was really on good terms with him, afforded reasonable help, and that though the house was not moved from with promptitude, the expenses inside it were curtailed. Cotman rubbed on, somehow, and in 1834 he received the appointment which I spoke of at the beginning--that post of drawing-master at King’s College, London, which he was to retain till his death.

Preparing to quit Norwich, and wishing to put money in his purse before doing so, he had a sale by auction of many of his effects. These included nearly twenty of his paintings in oil, and five guineas was the highest price realised for any one of them. He sold, likewise, some copies of his printed book: the demand proving by no means ‘active’--they were indeed rather ‘quiet’ than ‘lively’ or ‘firm’--but of the drawings he wisely kept back all that were still in his possession: they were destined to be serviceable in his King’s College lessons.

After a brief sojourn in Gerrard Street, Soho--a mere preparatory time--Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, was the spot fixed upon by Cotman for his London home. But he went down to Norwich still, now and then, in the autumn. His son, ‘J. J.,’ already gifted, and afterwards eccentric, was settled there. Cotman wrote letters to him, in many moods, now bright and fanciful, now depressed and forlorn. He was fond of the Thames before the Thames was popular--witness Mr. Reeve’s early ‘Twickenham,’ and Mr. Pyke Thompson’s later ‘Twickenham,’ the ‘Golden Twickenham’ of the Turner house at Penarth--and in one of those letters to the son ‘J. J.,’ there is ‘the log’ that records the adventures of Mr. Cotman’s ‘voyage’ with others of the ship’s company to Windsor, where they were ‘not victualled from hence’--from London, that is to say--and so might be expected to put in at Datchet. Then later, the brightness was all gone, and illness was upon him. ‘It was my duty, it was my wish, and I threatened to paint for your sake when you were here, but I could not; I was ill in body, and spiritless.’

Again, still later, ‘I am not quite well, but better. I am painting.’[5] And then he could paint no more. He died, in Hunter Street, in July 1842, and was buried on the 30th of that month, in what is now the dull suburban cemetery behind St. John’s Wood Chapel, within sound of the cheers from ‘Lord’s’ and the screech of the Metropolitan Railway.

[5] These letters, some of which belong to Mr. Reeve, and
others to the British Museum, have been quoted from more
amply in my _Studies in English Art_.

The beginning of the later period of Cotman’s art dates rather from the days of his visits to Normandy than from those of his removal to King’s College. I used to think that it was a good deal by the composition--by the theme chosen and by the disposition of its different elements--that we could best affix some approximate date to the undated work of this delightful master. And, unquestionably, composition counts; and the tendency as time advanced was towards a greater elegance in this matter--a more elaborate art, a franker departure from that Nature which suffers, in Boucher’s word, the grass to be ‘too green,’ which ‘lacks,’ in Lancret’s answer, ‘harmony and seductiveness.’ But, with a pretty familiar knowledge, now, of at least a couple of hundred of Cotman’s sketches and designs--the most accomplished of his work, with its wise and learned or inspired omissions, is sometimes disparaged as a ‘sketch’--I am inclined to extend the period during which Cotman’s art was wont to be wrought into studied fineness of line, and I would appeal, perhaps, chiefly to colour to settle the question as to the date of this or that drawing, coming from the hand of one who was a poet at the beginning and a poet at the end. Undoubtedly, in the best--in the very best--of Cotman’s later work (in Mr. Pyke Thompson’s ‘Blue Afternoon,’ for instance, and Mr. Bulwer’s ‘Blasting St. Vincent’s Rock’), there is a greater freedom of poetic expression than was reached in the earlier work; an even keener sensibility, an added love of luxury of hue and of forms that have grandeur sometimes in their restraint, or elegance in their abandonment. Certain black-and-white studies done in the last autumn of Cotman’s life--one October and November, when the country around Norwich lay under flood, and Cotman, visiting his native city, went out to depict no definite landscape, but ‘the world afloat’--display that faculty of seizing the spirit of a thing more than its body, which Youth, in any art, can hardly claim--which comes to men, it may be, with the refinement and chastening of the years. But the germs of all this faculty were there from the first. Cotman was indebted for them to no institution, and to no outward training. The Heavens had so willed it that his delightful labour--so sterling, so sober, so poetic--should evade popularity. He was granted his sensibilities that it should be impossible to vulgarise him. Through good report and evil report he was an artist only. And so he accomplished his work.

(_Magazine of Art_, December 1888.)

H. G. HINE

Strangely little notice, considering the artistic importance of the subject, has been taken of the death of H. G. Hine, the eminent artist in water-colours, vice-president of the Royal Institute, who died a fortnight ago, aged eighty-three years. The explanation, I fear, of the scanty comment his death has evoked, is to be sought in the fact that the mass of that public which concerns itself with Art at all, is occupied chiefly with such art as exhibits an easy piquancy of treatment or an obvious interest of subject. Hine’s did neither; yet the best-equipped critics have long done justice to the steady perfection with which he dealt with those themes of serene weather upon ‘the billows of the Downs,’ which--superlatively though they were executed by him--he, with a hankering sometimes after other compositions and other effects, declined to consider his speciality. Yet a speciality, of course, they were: those visions of turquoise or of opal sky, and of grey gold or of embrowned gold turf, with the long, restful sweeps and subtle curves, the luminous shadows, the points of light, with the shepherd and his flock on the ascending hillside, with the ancient thorn-tree bent by the winds of many an autumn.

Singularly unlike the work of strange refinement and unsurpassed subtlety which it was his wont to produce, was Hine himself, with his sturdy and sailorlike personality. Yet the character of the man was, in truth, not less admirable than the artistic finesse of his work. He found his true path somewhat late in life. His genius came to him almost as tardily, but then, perhaps, almost as powerfully, as did David Cox’s. He was long past fifty when--with a charm of composition not less certain than Copley Fielding’s, and with the genius of a far finer and fuller colourist--he began to do justice to the Sussex Downs, amid whose generally unconsidered scenery it had been his excellent fortune to be born.

(_Academy_, 30th March 1895.)

THOMAS COLLIER

English landscape art--the practice of which he had adorned by five-and-twenty years of noble work--sustains a profound loss in the death of Thomas Collier. He was born in the year 1840, at Glossop, on the Derbyshire border. He early addressed himself to the career of a landscape painter; and it is true, no doubt, that his method was founded upon that of David Cox, nor is it possible that he could have set up for himself a better model of delicacy of observation, and of decisive and economical handwork. And the medium of Collier was--like that of David Cox--almost exclusively water-colour. His oil paintings were few, and, like Cox’s, they were executed chiefly in his later time. But, with him, the later time was still only middle age. Collier died when he was fifty-one: David Cox at seventy-six. Had David Cox left us at the age of Collier, he would hardly have been remembered to-day, and could have been an example to no one. Collier passed through no such prolonged period of preparation for mastery. He was already a master in his early manhood. His work cannot well be divided into periods: freedom of manner, largeness of vision and touch, belonged to him almost from the first. To the quite superficial observer of his drawings, it appeared that he painted only two or three subjects, and these on the same grey day. But to the real student of his work, the richness and variety of his resource is revealed. He observed and recorded differences of weather and light which escape all casual and all untrained notice; and if he was among the simplest and most vigorous, he was also among the most poetic recorders of English countryside and homestead--of farm, and coast, and moor. His work, exhibited in France, obtained for him the decoration of a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and here in England he was one of the most distinguished members of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. But it is doubtful whether the opportunities afforded to the large public for seeing his work were frequent enough to secure him that degree of actual popularity which was his due; and it is at all events certain that when the cabinet of sketches which he showed occasionally to his friends shall come to be known more widely, Collier will be accorded, without cavil or questioning, a lasting place among the Masters.

(_Academy_, 23rd May 1891.)

LORD LEIGHTON

By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the combination of so many various qualities of character and talent than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that ‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’--to use the words most fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais--had come, of recent years at least, to be distinguished and known. The painter’s and designer’s art, evidenced in his youth, about forty years ago, by the ‘Procession of Cimabue,’ had not only never fallen into disuse, but had never come to occupy, in his mind, a secondary or comparatively unregarded place. But, along with the well-maintained devotion to the craft to which he had first vowed his affections a full generation ago, there had sprung up, partly of necessity and partly by reason of Lord Leighton’s exceptional temperament, many interests, exclusive of merely official duties, which occupied time and thought--so much so that if he had not added to the tastes of an artist the habits and qualifications of a great man of affairs, it would have been impossible for him to have successfully crowded into his life all the pursuits that engrossed it. It is easy for the ‘admirable Crichton,’ in these modern times, to degenerate into the Mr. Brook of _Middlemarch_--the not unamiable dilettante who was pretty certain to have once ‘taken up’ everything, and was pretty certain also to have dropped it. But Lord Leighton, great as was the diversity of his interests, was absolutely systematic and thoroughgoing; and, outside his especial art (in which his place, whatever may have been his deficiencies, was peculiar and unquestioned), he not only practised but excelled.

Leighton was linguist, student, antiquary, man of fashion, administrator, even philanthropist. His oratory was an accomplishment; albeit, in its addiction to ingenious ornament, his style was not quite of our period. His tact in dealing with men and with affairs was almost faultless. His opinions were decided, and he never concealed them; yet, in uttering them, he hardly ever gave offence--never, indeed, to the reasonable. When all these things are remembered, and when there is added to them the recollection of a presence elegant and stately, and of a manner which, though it could well keep intruders at a distance, had singular and winning charm for the many whom it was intended to please, it will be fully realised what a difficult and heavy honour awaits Lord Leighton’s successor in his great function--that of President of the Royal Academy, and official representative of English Art. The Academy contains several painters of genius; several amiable and distinguished men of the world; but as those who can look back the furthest declare that no past President of whom they had any knowledge ever equalled Lord Leighton, it may well be doubted whether a future President is likely to equal him.

So much by way of rough indication of the character of the man, and of the public man. A further explanation of his individuality must, of course, be discovered in his Art; and even a cursory survey of it--and of the creations which were the events of his life--will disclose something of his strength, and something, too, of his weakness. The son of a physician whose life was extended to a most ripe old age, and grandson of Sir James Leighton, also a doctor--long resident at the Court of St. Petersburg--Frederic Leighton was born at Scarborough, on the 3rd December 1830. A Yorkshireman in fact--like William Etty, and another remarkable artist of a later generation, Thomas Collier--no one could have been less of a Yorkshireman in character than was the late President. To what is understood or conjectured to have been a Jewish strain in his blood are possibly to be attributed his profoundly artistic inclinations, which were manifested very early, and which, as the public knows, dominated the whole of his career. It is recorded that young Leighton received drawing lessons in Rome as long ago as the year 1842; and not two years afterwards he entered as a student at the Academy of Berlin. With Rome, perhaps, began that long series of _Wanderjahre_ which made him so cosmopolitan an artist and so many-sided a man. He had some general education at Frankfort; then, after a removal to Florence, where the American sculptor, Hiram Powers, was consulted with a view to an opinion on his ability, and prophesied that the boy ‘could become as eminent as he pleased,’ young Leighton’s father withdrew his long-standing objections to the adoption of painting as a profession; and the new decision was followed by a sojourn in Brussels and a longer stay in Paris. In Paris the youth attended a life-school, and copied at the Louvre. Next we hear of him at Vienna, where he was a pupil of Steinle, himself a pupil of Overbeck. Of Overbeck’s religious unction, Leighton had never a perceptible share. Something he no doubt owed to the leaders of the German Renaissance of Painting; but amongst these, more, it may be, to Cornelius than Overbeck. After his sojourn in Vienna, he was back again in Rome--these early and most prolonged wanderings are worthy of chronicle, because they had so much to do with the formation of the characteristics of the artist--and it was from Rome that he sent to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 a picture which made no bid for immediately popular effect, which was nothing, moreover, of a ‘pot-boiler,’ and which made no concession to ordinary _bourgeois_ liking. It was the canvas in which is depicted, with something of reticence and grace, and with a very learned draughtsmanship, the procession which passed through the streets of Florence, on its way to Santa Maria Novella, when Cimabue’s picture of the Madonna was carried in the midst, and honour and peculiar recognition--in which a whole city joined--were bestowed upon its painter. Elegant as the picture was, it did not lack favour; a certain relative warmth, a certain romantic spirit, the presentation of the ideal, it may be, in more homely form, pleased a generation familiar with Dyce, Maclise, and Cope; and the picture, as it happened, had an immediate success.

Paris was Leighton’s next halting-place, and now, an artist rising above the horizon, he was no longer likely to seek direct instruction from any one of the painters who were there at work; but he was associated with, and was to some extent influenced by, men like Ary Scheffer (whose ‘Augustine and Monica’ was long appreciated in England) and Robert Fleury. He contributed almost without intermission, for the next eight or nine years, to the Royal Academy, and it was in 1864, when he was represented by an ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ that he was elected to the Associateship--becoming in 1869 a full member. The year of his election to the Associateship was likewise the year of the exhibition of his charming and seductive invention, ‘Golden Hours.’ To the painter of mediæval or Renaissance history, and of themes avowedly classic, there was vouchsafed the expression of the romantic and the unquestionably poetic, and it is, no doubt, to the certain element of poetry that is in Lord Leighton’s work--far more, at all events, than to its austerer qualities of design, which never had any popularity at all, and which, even amongst painters, have gone terribly out of fashion--that is to be attributed part of the great favour which his art has enjoyed. In 1869 was shown ‘Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,’ and in 1876 the second great processional, ‘The Daphnephoria.’ Two years later the ‘Arts of War’--not the least dignified and decorative of modern frescoes--was finished for South Kensington, where was already its companion, ‘The Industrial Arts of Peace,’ completed in 1873; another mural painting, that of ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins,’ having, at an earlier date, been placed in the chancel of a fortunate parish church in Hampshire. The year of the completion of ‘The Arts of War’ was that of Lord Leighton’s election to the Presidency of the Academy, which he obtained, it will be remembered, in direct succession to Sir Francis Grant, with whose courtly qualities, and with whose large and manly sympathies, he combined a width of artistic outlook, a refinement of artistic expression, which had scarcely perhaps belonged to any President of the Academy since the days of its first leader, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

President, and knighted in consequence of that distinction in 1878, Leighton was given a baronetcy in 1886. In the interval he had not only proved beyond dispute his fitness for the responsibilities of the official position, which he filled, but--to mention only some of the most memorable of many works--had completed his own portrait for the Uffizi, had wrought the really grave and impressive canvas of Elisha raising the son of the Shunamite widow, and had, in his peculiar fashion, effected an alliance between luxury in colour and sculpturesque arrangement of ‘line’ in the great ‘Cymon and Iphigenia.’ In actual Sculpture, too--sharing the ambition of the men of the Renaissance for a triumph in various mediums--he had produced ‘The Sluggard.’ It was extraordinarily clever, but perhaps its qualities were less truly sculptural than was some of his design executed in the older and more familiar material. Yet, if this particular work did not possess to the full all the great qualities that might have been expected in it, the order of Lord Leighton’s talent was one, nevertheless, which empowered him to succeed thoroughly in Sculpture, sooner or later; for, in Sculpture, while there was room for the generally unimpeded play of his own skill in design, there might have been a relief found from the exercise of his art in a path in which success to him was more uncertain and capricious--the path of colour.

It is too early, of course, to attempt to settle definitely the place of Leighton in English Art; but it is certain that his influence, whether as President or painter, tended to the extension of its vistas. An upholder of the Classic--never, with all his range, much in love with Realism--he was yet nothing whatever of a partisan, and--it may be mentioned as a characteristic detail of him in his daily ways--he was accustomed from time to time to purchase clever little drawings (sometimes the very last one would have thought he would care for) by artists who esteemed him as a President, but who regarded him very lightly as a practitioner of their own craft. Lord Leighton was perfectly aware that several circumstances limited--especially of late years--the appreciation of his work. He was not altogether insensible of its real defects--at all events, of peculiarities which were defects upon occasion. He knew that his ‘brush-work’ was not absolutely ‘modern.’ He must have allowed that, now and again, when it was by no means one of his aims to seek it, the texture of his flesh was porcelain-like, and thus mainly conventional. He was, confessedly, not greatly occupied with ‘values’ of colour, with the relation of part to part. He was at one--perhaps more than they knew it--with many of our newest artists in demanding a decorative quality; only the decorative quality of his choice was not always--was, indeed very seldom--that of theirs. A successful pattern of colour they could understand the virtue of. The Japanese, or Mr. Whistler, had taught it them. But a successful pattern of line, they were less capable of appreciating. They, for example, or some of them, execrated Bouguereau, and resented in some degree the hospitality prominently offered to that distinguished Frenchman on the walls of the Academy. Lord Leighton, on the other hand, was, very possibly, not fully alive to Bouguereau’s vices or failings--to his mere smoothness, softness, not infrequent vapidness of human expression. But he valued justly Bouguereau’s possession of the best Academic graces, of faultless composition and subtle draughtsmanship. For these things--these best Academic graces--he himself strove. These, too, he generally, though not always, attained.

In regard to this particular matter, there were times when Leighton knew himself to be a _vox clamantis in deserto_. But he had his mission. It is an immense tribute to him to recognise that any one caring, as he undoubtedly cared, to be acceptable amongst his fellows--amongst the younger men, even, who were some day to succeed him--should yet have been so true to his particular message. But Lord Leighton had an admirable courage as well as a great patience and an untiring diligence. And there were times, fortunately, when it was brought home to him beyond cavil, that some educated appreciation existed of his own especial artistic qualities, as well as of those human virtues which made him, in many ways, so estimable a man, and so fitting a leader of men.

(_Standard_, 27th January 1896.)

SIR JOHN MILLAIS

For the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular representative, and contemporary English Art of one who was long its most vigorous and most varied personality. Born at Southampton in 1829, the ‘son of John William Millais, Esquire, by Mary, daughter of Richard Evemy, Esquire’--as the official biographies relate--Millais was really the descendant of a Jersey family of long standing; but in character, personal and professional, he was typically English. It is partly by reason of the fact that, as a man and as an artist, Millais summed up some, perhaps, of the defects, many certainly of the great qualities, of our English race, that his popularity amongst all personal associates, and amongst the spectators of his decisive, strenuous, and eager work, was won so early, and has been so firmly held.

The man himself, during forty years or thereabouts of active adult life--the artist during forty years of scarcely relaxed endeavour--has been in thought, in conduct, in taste, and in production, pre-eminently healthy. Millais, in the generation and a half of his active life--for he began young--had seen fashions good and bad, foolish and reasonable, rise and pass away; but, save by the influences of his quite early days, the days of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has been practically unaffected. He has developed in the direction proper to himself. As time has passed, he and his sympathies have broadened and modified, and if we miss in much of the later work the intense and concentrated poetry of the earlier, that later work has qualities of its own that do something to compensate. The man himself, too--sportsman, man of the world, excellent comrade, hearty and sincere good fellow--has been essentially greater in his more recent than in his earlier times; for the temptations of a success, brilliant and uninterrupted, did him, as a man at least, little harm. Simple and generous he was--by all the records of his fellows--when he was at ‘Mr. Sass’s Academy’ fifty years ago. Simple and generous--generous especially in thought and judgment as well as in action--he remained, when in the late winter of the present year he was appointed to the visible headship of the profession to which he had given so much of the energy of his life.

Sir John Millais was only nine years old when he gained his first medal at the Society of Arts--Mozart himself scarcely came before the public in more tender years, as an executant upon the limited keyboard of his day--and when he was seventeen, ‘Jack’ Millais was already an exhibitor at the Academy. He was only twenty when his ‘Isabella,’ from the poem of Keats, disclosed a new talent, almost a new order of talent; at the least, a personality that had to be reckoned with--an influence that had to be either accepted or fought against. Yet more marked by an artistic individuality which was, in part, a return to older conceptions and views than those of his day, were the ‘Carpenter’s Shop,’ ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange,’ the ‘Huguenot,’ and ‘Ophelia.’ These, or most of them, are typical Pre-Raphaelite pictures--the offspring of the tacit rebellion of a whole group of men, only one of whom, Mr. Holman Hunt, remains to give effect in his later life to the principles enunciated in youth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti--Pre-Raphaelite to the end, though of course with certain modifications--was another of those men; but years have passed since he went from us. The group was completed by others never as celebrated, nor, as the world judges, so successful. They painted their pictures; they made their illustrations; they wrote as well as drew, in the quaint publication called _The Germ_, which the lapse of time and the fad of the collector have since made rare and valuable. Truth, rather than convention, was the aim of their practice; but they were not peculiar in that,--all youth, if it is earnest at all, is earnest for truth, or earnest rather for that particular side of truth which happens just then to have been revealed, and of which it exaggerates the value. Much has been written about the Pre-Raphaelite ‘movement’ and its supreme importance--as if it were a great religious Reformation and a French Revolution rolled into one. In History it is destined to be remembered because it was a phase through which two or three men of genius passed--a something, moreover, that for the moment welded them together. It will not be recollected, because at a later time mere imitative weaklings, by the dozen, made feeble fight under what they professed to be its banner.

The interest, then, for sensible people, in Millais’s early pictures, lies, not in the fact that they were Pre-Raphaelite, but in the fact that they showed, many of them, an intensity of vision, a profundity of poetic feeling, which is the property of gifted and of eager youth. The passionate, constant devotion--the devotion of a minute which lasts, you feel, for a lifetime; the ‘moment eternal,’ as the great poet puts it--of the Puritan Maiden and of the Cavalier she helps, is the interest of the ‘Concealed Royalist.’ The burning love-affair of the ‘Huguenot’ is the interest of a canvas on which, before the days when the aesthete had invented ‘intensity’ of attitude, Millais had determined that his lovers should be intense, instead of sentimental. Millais was in those years occupied very much with the presentation, never of strictly sensuous enjoyment (Rossetti’s field, rather than his), but of violent emotion, and uncontrolled, almost uncontrollable, impulse. His people felt keenly, but with the elevation of poetic natures, or of a poetic mood. And Millais painted them when their blood ran high. He chose the incident that seemed to him the most dramatic in all their story. He painted them on the crest of the wave--at the moment of crisis.

This, however, like the more naïve Pre-Raphaelitism of a yet earlier time, was but a phase--remarkable now chiefly because it has been so absolutely outlived; nay, because so much of the view of life taken subsequently by its author has, dominating it, a spirit so opposed to this one. But the transition was not rapid: the ‘Autumn Leaves’ of 1856, and the ‘Vale of Rest’ of 1860, have, at least, the poetic quality to the full, though with no violence of emotion. Rather, they are suggestive and reticent; weird and extraordinarily expressive: in the one there is depicted the wistfulness of childhood, in the other the melancholy resignation of a nun to whom ‘rest’ means brooding on a Past more eventful and more poignant than the occupation of her present day.

Notwithstanding his later technical development, nothing that Sir John Millais has painted will be remembered more definitely and firmly than these; and it is noteworthy that they are among the first pictures in which he relied in great measure upon landscape to express or suggest the sentiment which it was the picture’s business to convey. ‘Spring Flowers’ of 1860 was in a lighter and gayer vein, if it is, as we believe, the picture known originally as ‘Apple Blossom’--girls lounging in an orchard under the loaded and whitened boughs. ‘My First Sermon,’ in 1863, was more purely popular than anything we have named. It dealt with childhood almost in the spirit of Édouard Frère, but with its author’s singular realism of execution. ‘Vanessa,’ in 1869, marked Millais as occupied increasingly with technical problems--with the attainment of an almost novel boldness of effect. It is, like so many pieces of his middle and later middle time, brilliant in colour and brush-work. No one now thinks, we suppose, of claiming it as dramatic--that is, of connecting it especially with the character of the lady who came off second-best in the affections of Swift.

Very soon after the exhibition of ‘Vanessa,’ Millais, who had already sought impressiveness in landscape background, turned to pure landscape as a theme sufficient for the exercise of his art. He gave us then ‘Chill October,’ the October of the north and of the lowlands, with the wind passing over water, and the reeds and scanty foliage bent aside by its breath. The picture excited interest. It was visibly forcible. The conception of the scene, too, was unusual and, of course, unconventional; but in some later landscape work, Millais may have been at once nearer to Nature and nearer to the attainment of a perfected art. ‘New Laid Eggs,’ in 1873, with naïveté of expression and dexterity of handling, but with a rusticity not very convincing, was a ‘taking’ picture of happy, healthy, self-confident girlhood. Its importance, in the volume of its author’s work, was quite eclipsed the following year by the ‘North-West Passage,’ a canvas full of interest almost romantic, yet most direct in its record of character--the main figure being, indeed, a portrait of that Trevelyan who is associated in most men’s minds with the career of Shelley. He it was who in Sir John Millais’s picture posed as the sturdy sailor whose imagination engages him in a remote and unknown voyage. When, many years after it had been painted, the ‘North-West Passage’ was seen again in the Millais Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s or at the Grosvenor Gallery, it was felt that at the moment of its execution the painter had reached the summit of his real artistic greatness, the masculine and potent hand here best executing that which had been prompted by a mind at its most vigorous. ‘A Jersey Lily,’ in 1878, was a tribute to the then girlish beauty of Mrs. Langtry, who at about the same period was recorded by Mr. Watts with exquisite simplicity. Again, just as in his diploma picture it had pleased Millais to invoke the name of Velasquez, and to perform a feat such as that to which Velasquez was most wont to address himself, so, in another canvas, in one sense more important--that of the three Miss Armstrongs playing whist with a dummy--it pleased him to follow visibly in the steps of Sir Joshua Reynolds--recalling his composition; the portrait group of the three Ladies Waldegrave being the one with which he on this occasion made it his business to vie. In 1879 Sir John was able to exhibit one of the masterpieces of portraiture--that record or idealisation of Mr. Gladstone of which the nobility and charm were instantly recognised--a canvas which of itself would be sufficient to prove that the faculty of poetic vision never finally deserted an artist who had seemed of late to concentrate his energy rather on dexterous execution than on the expression of profound feeling or elevated mood. The ‘Mr. Bright,’ which pretty closely followed the ‘Gladstone,’ was comparatively unsuccessful. And the illness of the sitter and the consequent incompleteness of his presentation on Millais’s canvas, made yet more disappointing the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield which hung upon the walls of the Academy in 1881. Next year, however, came the ‘Cardinal Newman,’ to atone for all that had been amiss--again a poetic vision, a worthy rising to the exigencies of a great theme, a performance at once decisive and tender, energetic, yet exquisitely suave.

(_Standard_, 14th August 1896.)

BURNE-JONES

Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of _angina pectoris_, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age--a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power,--a ‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.