Chapter VI: Landscape Painting (2)

In the landscapes of the Bath and London periods the labored accuracy of the early work gives place to the “landscape generalization” by which Gainsborough’s mature paintings are characterized. In these later landscapes, of which the great “Watering Place” in the National Gallery may be taken as the supreme example, there is an apparent ignoring of the separate facts of Nature. No oaks are painted leaf for leaf. There is not even sufficient definiteness to make the kind of tree unmistakable. Yet the effect of Nature is adequately rendered. The mind is conducted into genuine woodland coolness and shade. As we look we become gradually conscious of the mysterious charm of Nature herself. These landscapes not only satisfy the eye by wonderful harmonies of color and flowing line, but they speak appealingly to the emotions. Constable says of them, “They are soothing, tender, and affecting. The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of morning are all to be found on the canvases of this most benevolent and kind-hearted man. On looking at them we find tears in our eyes and we know not what brings them.”[625]

In theme Gainsborough is distinctively English, and even within this limit his range is narrow. The grander elements in Nature did not stir his imagination. Mountains, the ocean, storms, were, to be sure, not entirely absent from his pictures. In 1781 he had apparently been painting along the coast, for Walpole comments on two pictures “of sea and land,” “so fine and natural that one stepped back for fear of being splashed.” One of these was, Mr. Conway thinks, the Duke of Westminster’s “Coast Scene,” “a sparkling picture, articulately suggestive of a single delightful idea,” a windy day on an estuary. In 1783 Gainsborough made a trip to Cumberland and Westmoreland, gaily predicting that on his return he would show “your Grays and Dr. Browns to be but tawdry fan-painters.”[626] Sir Walter Armstrong reproduces a chalk drawing subsequent to this period in which “the hills in the distance are thoroughly true in mass, perspective, and aërial envelope;”[627] Mr. Fletcher is of the opinion that had Gainsborough “lived a few years longer, he would undoubtedly have taken a new departure in landscape art;”[628] and Mr. Boulton finds in the pictures after 1783 a new tendency to deal with rocky foreground and mountain scenery.[629] Yet a few successful coast scenes and a late and certainly rather slight interest in mountain regions can hardly affect the statement that Gainsborough was, on the whole, but little moved by the grander aspects of Nature. He cared as little for the majestic, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, as he did for the trim, the formal, and the precise. What he loved to portray was the gently varied and picturesque scenery of his own countryside. He sought out woodland roads, lanes with steep grassy banks, trees heavy with foliage, tangled copses, pools of still water, skies glowing with sunset hues, or deepening into twilight, or with the blue showing through rifted storm clouds. Cumberland and Westmoreland had for him no appeal comparable to the remembered charm of Suffolk.

Gainsborough’s pictures of rural life do not properly come under the head of landscape painting, but the representation of country activities, and pure landscapes run into each other by many gradations. If we consider those pictures in which landscape elements distinctly predominate we shall find that the figures of men and animals are hardly more than animating or decorative details. One of the artist’s rare theoretical statements was to the effect that a landscape should admit only such figures as “create a little business for the eye to be drawn from the trees in order to return to them with more glee.”[630] Accordingly the figures whether of men or animals were painted because they helped out the scheme of light, of color, of form in the picture as a whole. But while this is true, it is likewise true that his rustic groups, his shaggy horses, his cattle, and goats, and donkeys, and pigs are something more than picturesque elements in the landscape. They help to individualize and interpret it, and they give it a quaint, homely charm. The grandeur of Wilson’s themes, the solemnity of his tone, make the few small figures in his pictures seem strikingly incongruous with the scene, but Gainsborough’s figures have an intimate union with the landscape.

However impossible it may be to determine who is the “father” of English landscape art, there can be no question as to the value of having at the formative period of that art two men so unlike in education, temperament, and taste as Wilson and Gainsborough. One brought in the Italian, the other the Dutch influence, yet each was too strong an individuality to be a mere copyist. The one painted with poetic comprehension and in a grand manner, not only the sunny skies, clear air, bright lakes, and ruined temples of classic lands, but also, and with equal power, scenes of dignity, grandeur, and pathos, in his own land, while the other painted with genuine tenderness and affection the lovely scenes of rural England. Both loved Nature passionately and strove to express that love in their pictures. From the point of view of a growing taste for the beauties of the out-door world, both artists are of the greatest importance. The transfer of interest from man to Nature is as marked in their pictures as in any other realm of thought and emotion.

Contemporary with Wilson and Gainsborough were many artists of lesser note whose work is nevertheless important because of the cumulative testimony it bears to the growing interest in Nature. The catalogues of the Society of Artists (1761–91), of the Free Society (1761–83), and of the Royal Society which began its exhibitions in 1769,[631] supplemented by some other scattered sources of information, give an idea of the scope and the themes of this work, though not many of the original pictures are now accessible.

We find, in the first place, that nearly all the artists who were painting from Nature before 1755 continued their work for periods of considerable length after that date. Boydell published forty plates from the “Derbyshire Views” of Thomas Smith who continued to exhibit till 1767.[632] Samuel Scott exhibited occasional sea and shore views to 1771. Between 1761–74 George Smith of Chichester exhibited over a hundred landscapes some of which show a reaching-out into new realms. He has not only _genre_ pictures such as “A Country Family Picking Their Own Hops” (1761)[633] and “Cottages in a Wood” (1773), but experiments such as “Moonlight,” “Mist,” “Sunset,” and eighteen “Frost” or “Snow” scenes. William Bellers is credited, between 1761–73, with seventy-seven landscapes, twenty-eight of them being views in the Lake District. Alexander Cozens lived till 1786 and exhibited many small landscapes in which he paid especial attention to “chiaro-oscuro.” His chief work, however, was as a teacher, and he published some books on art, notable among them being “The Shape, Skeleton, and Foliage of Thirty-Two Species of Trees” (1771, republished 1786). Taverner was also working as late as 1772. George Stubbs was constantly represented in exhibitions from 1761 to 1803.

_By Paul Sandby_]

Of far more importance than any of the artists mentioned in the foregoing paragraph is Paul Sandby,[634] who, as has already been indicated, was the first to make known to art the wild and beautiful scenery of the Scotch Highlands. In 1773 he exhibited his first Welsh picture, and after that he did much work in Wales. Though not the first to paint in that region--for Boydell, Wilson, Farington, and Devis were ahead of him--he yet did much to show its picturesque possibilities. His important Welsh “aquatint views taken on the spot” appeared in four sets of twelve plates each, beginning in 1775, the very year of Boydell’s publication of Wilson’s “Six Views.” These mountain pictures, especially those of the second series, justly rank as the most vital landscape work contemporary with Wilson and Gainsborough. “Llangolin in Denbigh,” “Conwyd Mill,” “Llanberis Lake and Great Mountain Snowdon,” “Pont-y-Pair over the River Conway” are but a few of the many pictures that show with what enthusiasm Sandby surrendered himself to impressions from the grand scenery of Wales. The striking change from early eighteenth-century topographical sketches where the building was merely rendered slightly more attractive by washed-in skies and greensward is evidenced by such pictures as Sandby’s “Wynnestay, Seat of Sir Watkins William Wynne” which is a pure landscape with no house visible. So, too, in “Chirk Castle” there is but the faintest indication of the castle in the distance. Sandby’s original purpose may have been topographical but the outcome was pure landscape of great interest and significance.

There are, in addition to these older men, several artists whose work begins about 1760 or soon after. Anthony Devis exhibited in 1761–63 eight pictures, chiefly “Views in Wales.” He would thus antedate all painters of Welsh scenery except Boydell. In 1761–78 James Lambert exhibited numerous landscapes including many with titles such as “A Misty Morning with Ewes and Lambs,” “Landscape with Ewes and Lambs,” “A Farm-yard with Cattle.” George Barret (1732–84) was an Irish painter who had taken a premium for landscape from the Dublin Society before he came to England in 1762. Of the fifty-five landscapes exhibited by him in England during the years 1764–82 the earliest were of Powerscourt Park in Ireland, but from 1769 to 1772 he shows Scotch and Lake District views, and in 1776–77 three pictures of “Llanberis Pool in the Mountains of Snowdon.” The list of his pictures shows some interesting special studies as “A Moonlight, with the Effect of a Mist; a Study from Nature” (1767); “A Group of Beech Trees” (1776); “A View of Windermere Lake, in Westmoreland, the effect, the sun beginning to appear in the morning, with the mists breaking and dispersing” (1781). Barret was a very popular painter. Of his premium picture in 1764 Barry wrote, “My friend and countryman, Barret, does no small honour to Landscape amongst us; I have seen nothing to match his last year’s premium picture. It has discovered to me a very great want in the aërial part of my favourite Claude’s performances.” Barret’s work brought prices never before paid for landscapes, Lord Dalkeith having given fifteen hundred pounds for three of them. The Rev. John Lock commissioned him to paint the principal rooms of his house from skirting to ceiling with landscape scenes.[635] Richard Wright (1735–75) was a marine painter known sometimes as “Wright of the Isle of Man.” In 1764 he took a premium of fifty guineas for a sea-piece from which Woollett engraved “The Fishery.” Such themes as “A Ship in a Squall,” “The Sun Dispersing a Fog,” “A Fresh Gale,” “A Moonlight,” show attempts at the representation of other aspects of the sea than merely as a background for England’s navy. Wright exhibited till 1773. Another marine painter, John Cleveley, exhibited from 1764–86. Fleets, royal yachts, ships of war, distinguished naval events, are his chief themes. Dominic Serres (1722–93) exhibited after 1765. He, too, was chiefly occupied with naval affairs, particularly so after 1780 when he became marine painter to his majesty. The Rev. William Gilpin (1723–1804) contributed to the interest in home scenery by numerous sketches and, especially, by his book, “Forest Scenery” (1786). Far more gifted was his younger brother, Sawrey Gilpin (1733–1807), who excelled as an animal painter. His most abundant as well as his most spirited and accurate work is in portraits of fine horses and dogs. But he painted other animals also, birds, deer, foxes, tigers, and even “American Bears” (1798). There is in the South Kensington Museum a beautiful canvas by Gilpin called “Cows in a Landscape.” It has a smooth, clear, decorative effect, the cows are broadly, simply, but realistically painted, and the landscape gives in most suggestive fashion the mists, the faintly illumined sky, the dewy feeling, of early morning.[636]

_By Joseph Farington_]

The men enumerated in the preceding paragraph did all of their work, or, in a few cases such as Paul Sandby and Sawrey Gilpin who painted through the century, did much of their most characteristic work, before 1785. There is still another group of men who were born about the middle of the century the bulk of whose work, or whose most significant work, belongs before 1800. Of professional marine painters we have Robert Cleveley who began to exhibit in 1780; the more celebrated Nicholas Pocock (1741–1821); and John Thomas Serres (1759–1825), all of whom carried on the traditional representation of noted ships, harbors, and naval actions. David Allan’s (1744–96) best work is his set of illustrations of “The Gentle Shepherd.” He went to the Pentland Hills and studied both the places and the people he wished to represent. “He visited,” says Cunningham, “every hill, dale, tree, stream, and cottage, which could be admitted into the landscape of the poet.... Glaid’s farm house, the Monk’s burn, the Linn, the Washing Green, Habbie’s How, New Hall House, and that little breast-deep basin in the burn, called Peggie’s pool, were all carefully drawn.” It was Allan’s endeavor to do in painting what Ramsay had done half a century before in poetry, and though his pictures are far from expressing the brightness and beauty of the poem, they fairly take rank as important attempts to represent native landscapes from careful, first-hand observation. James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) came to England about 1770, and was constantly represented in the exhibitions during the rest of the century. His vigorous storms and sea-scapes were long popular. The public taste that could laud De Loutherbourg’s pictures and neglect Wilson’s was severely satirized by “Peter Pindar.”[637] But De Loutherbourg has another claim to recognition in that he was one of the staunchest defenders of the picturesque scenery of the British Isles as against that of other lands. He maintained that no English painter need go abroad for inspiration when he had access to the Highlands of Scotland, the Lake District of Cumberland, and the mountainous region of North Wales. It was to further this idea that he opened his panorama of English scenery in 1782, a show by which Gainsborough was fascinated, and which, apparently, prompted his visit to the Lakes in 1783.[638] Thomas Hearne (1744–1817) is of importance in the early history of water-color. In 1777 he began a series of tours through Great Britain for the purpose of illustrating “The Antiquities of Great Britain” for which he made fifty-two drawings. Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse praises him for close and fresh observation of Nature, for excellence in atmospheric perspective, for truth of sunlight, and for beauty of trees and skies.[639] Though he lived well into the nineteenth century, much of his most finished work belongs before 1800. Joseph Farington (1747–1821) was a pupil of Richard Wilson. He exhibited almost yearly from 1765 to 1813. He may possibly have been with Wilson in Wales before 1766. At any rate he exhibited in 1768 and 1770 views of Snowdon Hill and Penmaenmawr. Between 1778 and 1784 are views of “Ambleside,” “Skiddaw and Derwentwater,” “Lodore,” “Rydal Waterfall,” “Borrodale Grange,” “Winandermere from High-harig.” Mr. Gilpin in his book on Cumberland (1786) says that descriptions are useless since there are prints so accurate and beautiful as these of Mr. Farington. Mr. Farington also has many views from Kent, Sussex, Devonshire, Oxford, and Buckinghamshire. John Rathbone (1750–1807), sometimes called “the Manchester Wilson,” began to exhibit in 1785. Of his forty-eight recorded landscapes eleven represent Lake District scenes, and most of the others are from similar scenery in Derbyshire, Lancashire, on the Wye, or in Wales. Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759–1817) painted Welsh views after 1796 and Cumberland views after 1798. He is best known, however, as a skilful painter of animals and of groups of gay, rollicking rustic figures in an agreeable landscape setting. Of the six pictures by him in the South Kensington Museum the one called “Jack in his Glory” is most characteristic. The “Conway Castle, North Wales” (1794) has the added interest of being a moonlight scene. Abraham Pether (1756–1812) began to exhibit in 1777. From 1784 to 1800 at least a fifth of his exhibited pictures were simply entitled “Moonlight.” He painted “a water-mill,” “an iron foundry,” “a waterfall,” “a fire,” and “ruins” by moonlight. He also chose as themes “Evening,” “Sunset,” “Morning just before Dawn,” “Evening and Rain,” and other unusual and delicately discriminated natural phenomena. Edward Dayes (1763–1804), the master of Girtin, made many studies in the Lake District after 1790. The “Windermere” and “Keswick Lake” in the gallery at South Kensington attest the truthfulness and charm of his work.

The most important landscape painters of the second half of the century have yet to be mentioned, Morland, Girtin, and Cozens. John Robert Cozens (1752–99) began to exhibit when only fifteen years of age. At twenty-four he was taken by Mr. Robert Payne Knight to Switzerland to make sketches of the scenery. Of the work done on this trip Mr. Monkhouse says,

These drawings of 1776 are remarkable in the history not only
of English water-colour painting and English art, but in the
history of landscape painting of all time. They are the first
successful[640] attempt to give a true impression of Alpine
scenery. From the first Cozens seems to have found his way to
render its character, to convey the grandeur of its snow-crowned
peaks, the depth of its valleys, the solitude of its lakes, the
appearance of its slopes, “fledged,” as Shelley sang, “with
pines,” the sun striking through the gorges on high-perched
cot, or village, the chill of the shaded hollows filled with
mist, the cloaks of cloud about the shoulders of the hills,--and
all this not in a pretty conventional or a grand conventional
manner, but with a style that was Nature’s own.... His mountains
look their height, and suggest their bulk and weight.[641]

Cozens was in England again by 1779. A second visit to Italy with Mr. Beckford ended in 1783 and resulted like the first tour in a large number of water-color drawings. Mr. Thornbury comments on a view of a glacier valley executed at this time as “worthy of all praise for its multitudinousness, breadth, and grand, harmonious simplicity, as well as for the dazzling purity of its colour.”[642] Constable said of Cozens that he was “all poetry,” and that “he was the greatest genius that ever touched landscape;” and Turner said that from Cozens’ “Hannibal Crossing the Alps” (1776) he had learned more than from anything he had before seen.[643]

Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) had a short life but he came early to the maturity of his genius. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1794 to 1801. In about 1796 he went to the north of England and to Scotland with James Moore, and there “made many sketches of pure landscape, recording the grand effects of light and shade upon the swelling moors and rolling downs, with a breadth and simplicity and a large regard to truth never equalled before.”[644] In the South Kensington Gallery are many water-colors by Girtin that show his excellent drawing and his skill in the use of color. Four Yorkshire views, a “Coast Scene,” and three river scenes well illustrate the truth and vigor with which he represented landscape. Mr. Ruskin said of Girtin’s work, “He is often as impressive to me as Nature herself; nor do I doubt that Turner owed more to his teaching and companionship than to his own genius in the first years of his life.”[645]

_By George Morland_]

George Morland (1763–1804) exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of ten, and from that time on each year saw many pictures from his brush. He seldom painted pure landscapes. But whatever his theme the landscape setting is almost invariably worthy of particular attention. In many notable pictures of gipsies or wood-cutters it is, in fact, not the fat, invertebrate figures of men and women that hold the eye. The imagination is captured instead by the bower of shade, by the deep wild-wood of the background. So, too, in various coast scenes, the chalk cliffs against which breakers dash in blinding spray, the trees bending before the wind, the rifts of blue sky showing through scattering storm clouds, the feeling of rain in the air, certainly count for as much in the general impression as do the men tugging at the rope or lading wagons with the spoils of the sea. Nearly all of Morland’s domestic pictures have an exquisite framework of old oak trees, climbing vines, and flowering shrubs. J. T. Smith[646] says that Morland was “the first artist who gave the sturdy oak its peculiar character in landscape painting.”

As a painter of animals Morland excels. His horses are of especial interest for he does not expend his art on portraits of noted racers or thoroughbreds, but on work-horses, and preferably on such horses at the moment of release from toil. “The Inside of a Stable” (1791) in the National Gallery, and “Horses in a Stable” (1791) in the South Kensington Gallery are two of his finest works; and they show not only his power of painting dim old interiors in the softest blend of color, but they show particularly the attentive sympathy with which he had studied horses. Many similar pictures could be cited but chief among them for pathetic understanding is “The Blind White Horse.” Pigs were among Morland’s favorite subjects. So frequently did he introduce them into his pictures that the title-page of a book of his sketches portrayed him leaning over a fence and making a drawing of three fat sows. The animals in his pictures were all studied from the life. The white horse so often depicted by him was modeled from an old nag he bought and kept for a fortnight in his painting room. He regularly kept by him various sorts of animals for study, “dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs, fowls, ducks, pigeons, mice, and many other kinds of livestock,”[647] and sooner or later these were sure to appear in his pictures with convincing realism.

Morland rather defiantly declared that “the barn, the cow-house and the piggery” were his favorite themes, but he has another class of subjects, his numerous pictures of children, in which the out-door setting is of great charm. Reynolds had painted beautiful pictures of high-born, well-dressed children; and Gainsborough had given lovely, pathetic, somewhat idealized representations of cottage children; but Morland takes us into the realm of childhood itself, and his gay, romping lads and lasses swing on gates, play games, go nutting, sail toy boats, in the midst of most delightfully real out-of-door surroundings.[648] All that Morland does is simple, genuine, spontaneous, and has a permanent appeal, and his landscape without being especially beautiful or at all novel, has a sort of homely, intimate, and obvious charm.

A survey of the century shows that there has been from 1700 to 1800 a remarkable change in the attitude of painting toward the external world. From a predominating interest in man as shown in history-painting and portraiture, with, at the best, landscape as an unimportant background or adornment, we come to a period when landscape is not only a very important element in portraiture, but is counted as so valuable in itself that figures take rank as hardly more than insignificant landscape detail. The development of the love of Nature is shown in painting in England somewhat later than in poetry: Thomson antedates the early English landscape painters, and Wordsworth’s characteristic poetry of Nature is somewhat earlier than the great paintings of Turner and, Constable. But in abundance and variety of theme the English landscape artists have, by the end of the century, surpassed even the poetry of the period. Pastoral England receives especially full recognition. The ocean is, however, comparatively unimportant as a source of inspiration, even as we have seen it to be in the poetry of the same years. Perhaps the most striking fact is the remarkable influence of mountains in reawakening the love of Nature. The most enthusiastic and original landscape work was based on the wild scenery of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Lake District.[649]

Two other facts that bear upon the period as a whole should, in conclusion, be noted. The first of these is the stimulus given to the interest in Nature in England by the sketches brought home by artists who had been in foreign lands. Nearly every artist studied in Italy so that separate mention of Italian scenes is not necessary. But some artists went into newer fields. Charles Fox (1749–1809) is interesting as being the first recorded artist to visit Norway, Sweden, and Russia for the purpose of representing the wild scenery of those countries. Draughtsmen accompanied almost every public or private expedition to remote regions. William Pars went with Dr. Chandler to Greece, 1764–66, and with Lord Palmerston to various parts of the continent in 1767. Thomas Hearne was in the Leeward Islands with Sir Ralph Payne in 1771–75. John Cleveley went with Sir Joseph Banks to the Hebrides in 1772, and with Captain Phipps to the North Sea in 1774. John Webber was with Captain Cook on his last voyage to the South Seas in 1776–80. A. M. Devis was in the Orient for the East India Company in 1788. And William Alexander went with Lord Macartney to China in 1792. These men brought back hundreds of views, many of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy and later appeared as illustrations in the books describing the various tours. The interest aroused by these pictures is an evidence of the new romantic delight in whatever is remote, and especially in the landscape characteristic of distant lands. But it must be noted that the importance of this work is lessened by the two facts that most of it belongs late in the century, after English landscape art was already fairly well established, and that, in the second place, much of it is of merely curious interest and intended to show the oddities in flora or fauna or in human life in the various countries.

The second point is the prolonged dominance of foreign models. Walpole in his “Anecdotes of Painting” (1762–71) said quite justly that English artists drew “rocks and precipices and castellated mountains” not because they saw such objects in England but because “Salvator wandered amongst Alps and Apennines.” But the artists were not alone in preferring to look at Nature through Italian spectacles. Poets, too, gave praise to the Poussins, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain. When Thomson in “The Castle of Indolence” (1748) had the cool airy halls of his palace decorated with landscapes he chose

Whate’er Lorraine light-touch’d with softening hue
Or savage Rosa dash’d or learned Poussin drew.

A quarter of a century later we find these artists in undiminished authority, for Mason (“The English Garden,” 1772) declares that the true law-givers in the realm of the picturesque are Claude, Salvator Rosa, and Ruysdael. An interesting illustration of the general acceptance of the Italian or Dutch masters comes in 1754 from the realm of house decoration. In that year Mr. Jackson of Battersea published “An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing ... and the Application of it to the Making of Paper Hangings” in which he advised, in order to show “the Taste of the owner,” “the introduction into the Pannels of the Paper” of prints taken from “the works of Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Gasper Poussin, Berghem, or Wouverman or any other great master” in landscape. But perhaps, after all, no class of writers shows more clearly the tendency to regard English scenes from the point of view of Italian landscape art than do the early travelers. Dr. Brown in his famous “Letter from Keswick” says that to give a complete idea of the beauty of that region would require the united powers of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin. “The first should throw his delicate sunshine over the cultivated vales, the scattered cots, the groves, the lake, and wooded islands. The second should dash out the horror of the rugged cliffs, the steeps, the hanging woods, and foaming waterfalls; while the grand pencil of Poussin should crown the whole with the majesty of impending mountains.” So, too, Mr. Cradock says his utmost of Snowdon when he boldly declares that it is as rich a region to him as Tivoli or Frascati, and that “the romantic imagination of Salvator Rosa was never inspired with a more tremendous idea, nor his extravagant pencil never produced a bolder precipice.” Mr. Hutchinson in praising Keswick and Skiddaw says that “Claude in his happiest hour never struck out a finer landscape.” In a summary of the glories of the Lake District he says, “The painters [_sic_] of Poussin describe the nobleness of Hulls-water; the works of Salvator Rosa express the romantic and rocky scenes of Keswick; and the tender and elegant touches of Claude Loraine, and Smith, pencil forth the rich variety of Windermere.” West’s “Guide” is professedly written in the interests of landscape painting, but not of English landscape art, though by 1778 there was strong and abundant English work. In each scene West still finds suggestions of Italian painters only. Throughout his tour he marked many “Stations” from which the artist in search of material could get hints for pictures. On Coniston Lake he would find verified “the delicate touches of Claude,” on Windermere-water “the noble scenes of Poussin,” on Derwentwater “the stupendous, romantic ideas of Salvator Rosa.” A traveler across Lancaster Sands would see the mountain of Ingleborough from “as happy a point of view as that selected by Claude in his picture of Soracte on the Tyber.” The region of the Langdale Pikes is “as grand an assemblage of mountains, dells, and chasms, as ever the fancy of Poussin suggested, or the genius of Rosa invented.”

Later in the century the scenic school of the Italians partially gave way before the growing supremacy of the Dutch artists. In 1795 “Anthony Pasquin” in a critical review of the pictures exhibited in that year says,

When many of our present race of landscape painters wish to make
a _study_, they do it by their firesides; they take an old
perished copy of Wynants, Ruysdael, or Hobbima, or a damaged
copy from some eminent artist, and _compose_ by stealing a
tree from one, a dock-leaf from another, and a waterfall from
a third. By this means we have Flemish landscapes peopled with
English figures, and the same unvaried scenes served up _ad
infinitum_.

That the taste of the purchasing public remained, until late in the century, steadily in favor of foreign work may be shown in various ways. Hogarth’s satires on the rage for “Old Masters” and Foote’s comedy “Taste” (1752) in which a picture is pronounced excellent until discovered to be by “an Englishman _now living_” when it is discarded as “not worth house-room,” are significant mid-century attacks on the undiscriminating demand for continental pictures. Records of sale by the celebrated auctioneer Longford illustrate the same fact. In 1764 he sold a collection of two hundred and fifty paintings belonging to Roger Hearne. About one third of these were landscapes, but not a single English artist, unless Van de Velde should be so counted, is represented in the list. In 1765 the pictures of “Mr. Samuel Scott, Painter (who is retiring into the Country)” were sold. Of these pictures thirty-three were his own landscapes. Of the remaining ninety canvases nearly all were landscapes, but again with no English names in the list except Lambert and Marlow. In 1768 Mr. Thomas Payne’s collection, largely made up of landscapes, has one each by Monamy, Swaine, Lambert, Scott, and three by Wootton. In 1769 the pictures of Smith of Derby were sold. He had five by Brooking, but all the rest were his own unsold canvases of Lake District, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire views. George Barret’s sale in 1771 was an attempt to dispose of sixty-seven of his own views in Wales, Ireland, and the Lake District. He advertised “waterfalls, effects of morning, of evening, of moonlight, a remarkable great tree, etc., etc.” It is not till 1790 that we come upon a distinctively English collection. In that year “Mr. Serres, Jun., Marine Painter (Going to Italy)” offered for sale five hundred and fifteen pictures nearly two hundred of which were landscapes by English artists. Thirty-two artists were named in the list. This slow development of English appreciation for English landscape art makes all the more evident the vitality of the impulse that led to productivity so ample and varied in that field.