established itself in London, with a new kind of art and a new attitude to
art. By 1750, a number of native-born artists were making very fair
.livings in branches other than the "safe" one of portrait-painting. There
were distinguished painters in landscape, sea-painting, and animal
painting, quite apart from Hogarth's innovation of satirical comic
painting. For Englishmen it may be true that landscape and animal painting,
and to an extent sea-painting, have always been best loved when they retain
something of portraiture - are portraits, in fact, recognizable likenesses
of their own parks, houses, or towns, of their cities, of their ships or
sea-battles.
The best landscapes painted in England at the closje of the
seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centu-ries were
topographical in nature. In marine painting the leading figure was Samuel
Scott (1702-1772), a contemporary of Hogarth, who began by painting in the
manner of Van de Veldes, but who later switched to townscape almost
certainly in answer to a demand that had been created by Canaletto. His
(Canaletto's) paintings were widely known here, brought back by young
Englishmen^as perfect souvenirs, before he himself came in 1746.
Scott, following close in Canaletto's footsteps in
his views of London, caught perhaps more of the veil of moisture that is
almost always in English skies. But Scott lacked the Venetian's
spaciousness and the logic of picture-making.
Richard Wilson (1714-1782) developed a stronger, more severe style, in
which the classic inspiration of the two French masters of the Italian
landscape, Claude and GaspardPoussin, is very clear; as also, rather later,
is that'of "the broad shimmering golden visions of the Dutchman, Cuyp.
Wilson's English work of the sixties and seventies, more various than
is often thought, is at its best of a calm, sunbasking, poetic distinction;
to the English landscape he transferred something of the miraculously lucid
Roman light, in which objects in the countryside can seem to group
themselves consciously into picture. On other occasions Wilson found in the
Welsh and in the English scene a ra-diant yet brooding tenderness, the
placid mystery of wide stretches of water, over which the eye is drawn deep
into the picture to the far Haze on the horizon where sight seems to melt.
Sometimes he also made a bid to align his compositions with the classic
example of Claude by peopling them with classic or mythological figures.
The most remarkable of Gainsborough's landscapes have, in fact, only
found a full appreciation this century. These are very early landscapes,
painted in Suffolk about 1750; strictly they are not pure landscapes as
they include portraits, but the synthesis of the two genres is so perfect
that the pictures become portraits of more than a person - of a whole way
of life, of a country gentry blooming modestly and naturally among their
woods and fields, their parks and lakes. The directness of
characterization is so
traightforward as to seem almost naive. The light on land and tree and
water has a rainwashed brilliance, and a strange tension of stillness -
sometimes it is almost a thunderlight.
In his later pure landscapes, the woodenness melts under the brush
of a painter who loved the radiant shimmering fluency of his medium as
perhaps no other English painter has ever done.
Wilson and Gainsborough form the two main peaks in eighteenth century
landscape painting.
Gainsborough's Landscapes
As a landscape painter Gainsborough was influenced in his early years
by Dutch seventeenth century pictures seen in East Anglia; and the
landscape backgrounds in his Ipswich period portraits are all in that
tradition. But during his Bath period he saw paintings by Rubens and
thereafter that influence is apparent in his landscape compositions. The
landscapes of Gainsborough's maturity have spontaneity deriving from the
light rapid movement of his brush;- but they are not rapid sketches from
nature, he never painted out-of-doors; he painted his landscapes in his
studio from his drawings, and from the scenes which , he constructed in a
kind of model theatre, where he took bits of cork and vegetables and so on
and moved them about, and moved the light about, till he had arranged a
composi-tion. It is possible that some of his preliminary black and white
chalk landscape drawings were done out-of-doors; but the majority were
done in the studio from memory when he returned from his walk or ride; and
some of the finest of the drawings, the "Horses by a Shed", for example,
resulted perhaps from a combination of the two procedures - a rough pencil
note made on the spot and reconsidered in terms of composition with the
aid of his candle and the model theatre after dinner. At his highest level
he went far beyond the current formulae and achieved a degree of
integrated three-dimensional arrangement.
Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers"
Probably the most lasting impression made on many people by Richard
Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers" is of the golden light that suffuses
the painting. It is a sort of light we associate with a warm summer
evening. Actual sunlight doesn't often have such a mellow tone, but this
colour accords perfectly with the image many of us hold of what evening
light ideally should be. Almost everything about this painting has a
similar elysian quality. None of us has seen a view exactly like this one,
and yet it immediately strikes a sympathetic chord: the cattle lazing in
the late sun while the herders take a swim; the softly rounded hills with
masses of unruffled foliage; the quiet river meandering toward the distant
mountain and the still more distant, unclouded horizon. There is even a
ruined temple, picturesquely placed as a gentle reminder of the transitory
character of man's achievement in the face of nature. Eve-rything about
this painting contributes to this idyllic mood. It is a little too good to
be true; but we wish it might be true.
Richard Wilson himself had never seen this view any more than we
have, because it does not exist. It was for him, as it is for us, an ideal
landscape, sensitively developed in his imagination from his recollections
of things encountered, both in nature and in art. It was an attitude that
was widely accepted in Wilson's day. The artistic climate that produced a
painting such as "River Scene with Bathers" is akin to that which accounts
for "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse".
Underlying the interest in creating an "ideal" landscape was the
assumption that art should aspire to something more than mere sensuous
gratification; that it should elevate the thoughts of the spectator and
purge his mind of petty considerations. This was to be achieved both by
what was included and (equally important) the way in which it was
represented. The scene, with its ruin, spacious vista, and warm summer
light, is meant to remind us of Italy, or at least the Mediterranean area,
and to arouse by association a train of thought concerned with pastoral
idylls of the classical past. But this effect is strongly supported by the
way in which Wilson has organized the elements in his painting to sustain a
mood of quiet and repose. The picture is carefully balanced around the
centrally placed ruin. The hill to the right finds just the proper counter-
poise in the distant mountain and the broad stretch of valley to the left.
The group of bathers on the left is balanced by the cattle on the right.
The whole view is enframed by trees on either side and set comfortably back
in space by a dark' foreground ledge. The sense of balance involves many
factors, including shape, light, texture and distance. Nothing appears
forced, but every element in the picture has been conceived and placed with
regard to its relation to the
whole.
7) SCIENCE AND ANIMAL PAINTING
Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) and George Stubbs (1724-1806)
A most interesting figure was Joseph Wright of Derby, an able enough
painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was conventionally London-
trained in portraiture, and made the, by then, conventionally necessary
trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he returned in the
end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed,
practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn'of the Industrial
Revolution. He saw the world in a forced and sharpening light'- sometimes
artificial, the mill-windows brilliant in the night, faces caught in the
circle of the lamp, or the red glow of an iron forge, casting mon-strous
shadows. This was an old trick - deriving from Caravaggio and the Dutch
candlelight painters - but with it Wright brought out a sense of
exploration and exploitation - scientific, intellectual and commercial,
the spirit of the Midlands of his time. His patrons were men like the
industrialist Arkwright of the spinning Jenny, and Dr Priestley, the
poetic seer of the new science (both of whom he painted).
The "Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump", painted in 1768, is
perhaps his masterpiece. Air-pumps were in considerable production in the
Midlands at the time, but this is not merely an excellently painted and
composed study of scientific experiment. It is raised to the pitch of a
true and moving drama of life by the tender yet un-sentimental exploration
of a human situation. The bird in the globe will die, as the vacuum is
created in it; the elder girl on the right cannot bear the idea and hides
her face in her hands, while the younger one though half-turned away also,
looks up still to the bird with a marvellous and marvelling expression in
which curiosity is just overcoming fear and pity. The moon, on the edge of
cloud, seen through the window on the right, adds another dimension of
weird-ness and mystery.
This is a picture that exists on many levels but, as it was not
expressed in terms of the classical culture of the age, Wright's subject
pictures were for long not given their due. He himself stood apart from
that (classical) culture; although he early became an associate of the
Royal Academy, he soon quarrelled with it.
George Stubbs presents in some ways a similar case: he never became a
full member of the Royal Academy. He was, for his contemporaries, a mere
horse-painter. In the last few years he has been much studied, and his
reassess-ment has lifted him to the level of the greatest of his'time. His
life has been fairly described as heroic. The son of a Liverpool currier,
he supported himself at the begin-ning of his career" in northern England
by painting por-traits, but at the same time started on his study of
anatomy, animal and human, that was to prove not only vitally im-portant to
his art but also a new contribution to science. Stubbs was one of the
great English empiricists. He took a farm-house in Lincolnshire and in it,
over eighteen months, he grappled with the anatomy of the horse. His models
were the decaying carcasses of horses, which he gradually stripped down,
recording each revelation of anatoT my in precise and scientific drawing.
The result was his book The Anatomy of the Horse, a pioneering work both in
science and art.
All his painting is based on knowledge drawn from ruthless study,
ordered by a most precise observation. In the seventies, his scientific
interests widened from anatomy to chemistry, and helped by Wedgwood, the
enlightened founder of the great pottery firm, he experimented in enam) el
painting. His true and great originality was not on-conventional lines, and
could not be grasped by contemporary taste.
