# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Painting

See also Painting on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​PAINTING, in art, the action of laying colour on a surface, or the representing of objects by the laying of colour on a surface. It is with painting in the last sense, considered as one of the fine arts, that this article deals. In the first sense, in so far as painting is a part of the builder’s and decorator’s trade it is treated above under the heading Painter-Work. The verb “to paint” is derived through Fr. peindre (peint, the past participle, was possibly the earliest part adopted, as is suggested ​ in the New English Dictionary), from Lat. pingere, to paint. From the past participle pictus comes pictura, picture, and from the root pig, pigment. The ultimate meaning of the root is probably to decorate, adorn, and is seen in Gr. ποικίλος, many-coloured, variegated.
In Part I. of this article, after a brief notice of the general character of the art and an account of its earliest manifestations, a sketch is given of the course of its development from the ancient Egyptian period to modern times. (An account, by countries, of recent schools of painting will be found as an appendix at the end of Part III.) The point of view chosen is that of the relation of painting to nature, and it is shown how the art, beginning with the delineation of contour, passes on through stages when the effort is to render the truth of solid form, to the final period when, in the 17th century, the presentment of space, or nature in all her extent and variety, becomes the subject of representation. Certain special forms of painting characteristic of modern times, such as portraiture, genre painting, landscape, still-life, &c., are briefly discussed.
Part II. consists in tables of names and dates intended to afford a conspectus of the different historical schools of painting from the 12th century A.D. downwards.
Part III. is devoted to a comprehensive treatment of the different technical processes of painting in vogue in ancient and modern times.
Authorities.—There is one elaborate general treatise on the whole art of painting in all its branches and connexions. It is by Paillot de Montabert, and was published in Paris (1829–1850). It is entitled Traité complet de la peinture, and is in nine substantial volumes, with an additional volume of plates. It begins with establishing the value of rules for the art, and giving a dictionary of terms, lists of artists and works of art, &c. Vols. ii. and iii. give the history of the art in ancient, medieval and modern times. Vols. iv., v., vi. and vii. contain discussions on choice of subjects, design, composition, &c.; on proportions, anatomy, expression, drapery; on geometry, perspective, light and shade, and colour. In vol. viii., pp. 1–285 deal with colour, aerial perspective and execution; pp. 285–503 take up the different kinds of painting, history, portrait, landscape, genre, &c.; and pp. 503–661 are devoted to materials and processes, which subject is continued through vol. ix. To encaustic painting 125 pages are given, and 100 to painting in oil. A long discussion on painting grounds and pigments follows, while other processes of painting, in tempera, water-colour, enamel, mosaic, &c., are more briefly treated in about 200 pages, while the work ends with a notice of various artistic impedimenta. Vol. i., it should be said, contains on 70 pages a complete synopsis of the contents of the successive volumes. The best general History of Painting is that by Woltmann and Woermann (Eng. trans., London, 1880, &c.), but it does not go beyond the 16th century A.D. See also the separate articles on China (Art), Japan (Art), Egypt (Art), Greek Art, Roman Art, &c.
For the Italian schools of painting may be consulted: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy (2nd ed., London, 1902, &c.). The original edition was published in London under the titles History of Painting in Italy (3 vols., 1864–1866), and History of Painting in North Italy (2 vols., 1871), Venturi, Storia dell’ arte italiana (Milan, 1901, &c.).
For the German: Janitschek, Geschichte der deutschen Malerei (Berlin, 1890).
For the Early Flemish: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, The Early Flemish Painters (2nd ed., London, 1872); Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexicon (Vienna and Leipzig, 1906, &c.); Weale, Hubert and John van Eyck (London, 1907).
For the Dutch: Wurzbach; Bode, Studien zur Geschichte der Holländischen Malerei (Braunschweig, 1883) and Rembrandt und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1906); Havard, The Dutch School of Painting (trans., London. 1885).
For the French: Lady Dilke, French Painters of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1899); D. C. Thomson, The Barbizon School.
For the English: Redgrave, A Century of Painters of the English School (London, 1890).
For the Scottish: W. D. McKay, R.S.A., The Scottish School of Painting (London, 1906).
For the American: J. C. Van Dyke (ed.). History of American Art (New York, 1903, &c.); S. Isham, A History of American Painting (N. Y., 1905).
The modern schools generally are treated fully, with copious bibliographical references, by Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting (2nd ed., Eng. trans., London, 1907).
Part I.—A Sketch of the Development of the Art
§ 1. Constituents and General Character.—If we trace back to the parent stock the various branches that support the luxuriant modern growth of the graphic art, we see that this parent stock is in its origin twofold. Painting begins on the one side in outline delineation and on the other in the spreading of a coloured coating over a surface. In both cases the motive is at first utilitarian, or, at any rate, non-artistic. In the first the primary motive is to convey information. It has been noticed of certain savages that if one of them wants to convey to a companion the impression of a particular animal or object, he will draw with his finger in the air the outline of some characteristic feature by which it may be known, and if this do not avail he will sketch the same with a pointed stick upon the ground. It is but a step from this to delineation on some portable tablet that retains what is scratched or drawn upon it, and in this act a monument of the graphic art has come into being.
In the other case there are various motives of a non-aesthetic kind that lead to the covering of a surface with a coat of another substance. The human body, the first object of interest to man, is tender and is sensitive to cold. Wood, one of the earliest building materials and the one material for any sort of boat-building, is subject, especially when exposed to moisture, to decay. Again, the early vessel of clay, of neolithic date, because imperfectly burned, is porous. Now the properties of certain substances suitable for adhesive coatings on anything that needed protection or reinforcement would soon be noticed. Unctuous and oily substances like animal fat, mixed with ashes or some such material, are smeared by some savages on their bodies to keep them warm in cold regions and to defend them against insect bites in the tropics. Wax and resin and pitch, liquefied by the heat of the sun or by fire, would lend themselves readily for the coating of wood with a substance impervious to moisture. Vitreous glazes, first no doubt the result of accident, fused over the surface of the primitive clay vessel would give it the required impermeability. This is no more art than the mere delineation which is the other source of painting, but it begins to take on itself an aesthetic character when colour plays a part in it. There are physiological reasons why the colour red exercises an exciting influence, and strong colours generally, like glittering surfaces, make an aesthetic appeal. In prehistoric times the flesh was sometimes stripped from the skeleton of a corpse and the bones rubbed with red earth or ruddle, while the same easily procured colouring substance is used to decorate the person or the implement of the savage. In this sensibility to colour we find a second and distinct origin of the art of painting.
What a perspective does a glance back at the development of painting afford! Painting, an art that on a flat surface can suggest to illusion the presence of solid forms with length, breadth and thickness; that on the area of a few square inches can convey the impression of the vast spaces of the universe, and carry the eye from receding plane to plane till the persons or objects that people them grow too minute for the eye to discern; painting that can deck the world in Elysian brightness or veil it in the gloom of the Crucifixion, that intoxicates the senses with its revelation of beauty, or magician-like withdraws the veil from the mysterious complexity of nature; the art that can exhibit all this, and yet can suggest a hundredfold more than it can show, and by a line, a shade, a touch, can stir within us “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—this Painting, the most fascinating, because most illusive in its nature, of all the arts of form, is in its first origin at one time a mere display to attract attention, as if one should cry out “See here!” and at another time a prosaic answer to a prosaic question about some natural object, “What is it like?” The coat or streak or dab of colour, the informing outline, are not in themselves aesthetic products. The former becomes artistic when the element of arrangement or pattern is introduced. There is arrangement when the shape and size of the mark or marks have a studied relation to those of the surface on which they are displayed; there is pattern when they are combined among themselves so that while distinct and contrasted they yet present the appearance of a unity. Again, the delineation, serving at first a purpose of use, is not in itself artistic, and it is a difficult question in aesthetic whether any representation of nature that aims only at resemblance really ​ comes into the domain of art. It is of course acknowledged that a mere prosaically literal likeness of a natural object is not a work of art; but when the representation is of such a kind as to bring out the character of the object with discrimination and emphasis, to give the soul of it, as it were, and not the mere lineaments, then, logically or illogically, art claims it as its child. In the strict sense the delineation only becomes artistic when there is present the element of beauty in arrangement or composition. The insight and sympathy just referred to are qualities rather intellectual than artistic, and the really artistic element would be the tasteful fitting of the representation to the space within which it is displayed, and the harmonious relations of the lines or masses or tones or colours that it presents to the eye. In other words, in artistic delineation there will be united elements drawn from both the sources above indicated. The representation of nature will be present, and so will also a decorative effect produced by a pleasing combination of forms and lines.
§ 2. Limitations of the Meaning of the word Painting.—If delineation take on itself a decorative character, so too decoration, relying at first on a pleasing arrangement of mere lines or patches that have in themselves no significance, soon goes on to impart to these the similitude, more or less exact, of natural objects. Here we arrive at a distinction which must be drawn at the outset so as duly to limit the field which this survey of painting has to cover. The distinction is that between ornamental or, in a narrow sense, decorative painting on the one side, and painting proper on the other. In the first, the forms employed have either in themselves no significance or have a resemblance to nature that is only distant or conventional. In painting proper the imitation of nature is more advanced and is of greater importance than the decorative effect to the eye. It is not only present but preponderant, while in ornamental work the representative element is distinctly subordinate to the decorative effect. In Greek vase decoration the conventional floral forms, or the mannered animal figures that follow each other monotonously round vases of the “Oriental” style, belong to the domain of ornament, while the human forms, say, on the earliest red-figured vases, while displayed in pleasing patterns and in studied relation to the shape and structure of the vessel, exhibit so much variety and so great an effort on the part of the artist to achieve similitude to nature, that they claim a place for themselves in the annals of the painter’s art.
A further limitation is also necessary at the outset. Pictorial designs may be produced without the equipment of the painter proper; that is to say, without the use of pigments or coloured substances in thin films rubbed on to or attached by a binding material upon a surface. They may be executed by setting together coloured pieces of some hard substance in the form of Mosaic (q.v.); by interweaving dyed threads of wool, linen or silk into a textile web to produce Tapestry (q.v.) or Embroidery (q.v.); by inlaying into each other strips of wood of different colours in the work called Tarsia or Marquetry (q.v.); by fusing different coloured vitreous pastes into contiguous cavities, as in Enamelling (see Enamel); or by framing together variously shaped pieces of transparent coloured glass into the stained glass window (see Glass, Stained).
These special methods of producing pictorial effects, in so far as the technical processes they involve are concerned, are excluded from view in this article and are dealt with under their own headings. Only at those periods when pictorial design was exclusively or especially represented by work in these forms will the results of these decorative processes be brought in to illustrate the general character of the painting of the time. For example, in the 5th and 6th Christian centuries the art of painting is mainly represented by the mosaics in the churches at Rome and Ravenna, and these must be included from the point of view of design in any review of painting, though as examples of mosaic technique and style they are treated in an article apart. Greek vase painting, again, is a special subject (see Greek Art and Ceramics), yet the designs on early Greek vases are the only extant monuments that illustrate for us the early stages of the development of classical painting as a whole. It will be understood therefore that in this article the word “painting” means the spreading of thin films of colouring matter over surfaces to which they are made by different means to adhere, and it will only be taken in a wider sense in certain exceptional cases just indicated.
§ 3. Importance in the Art of the Representation of Nature.—If we regard painting as a whole, the imitation of nature may be established as its most distinctive characteristic and the guiding principle of its development. It must at the same time be understood that in the advanced criticism of painting, as it is formulated in modern times, no distinction is allowed among the different elements that go to make up a perfect production of the art. In such a production the idea, the form, the execution, the elements of representation and of beauty, and the individual expression of the artist in his handiwork, are essentially one, and none of them can be imagined as really existing without the others. It is not the case of a thought, envisaged pictorially, and deliberately clothed in an artistic dress, but of a thought that would have no existence save in so far as it is expressible in paint. This is the modern truth of the art, and the importance of the principle here involved will be illustrated in a later section, but it must be borne in mind that the painting to which this principle applies is a creation of comparatively modern times. As in music so in painting, it has been reserved for recent epochs to manifest the full capabilities of the art. Whereas the arts of architecture and sculpture, though they have found in the modern era new fields to conquer, yet grew to their full stature in ancient Hellas, those of music and painting remained almost in their infancy till the Renaissance. It was only in the 16th and 17th centuries that painters obtained such a mastery on the one hand over the forms of nature, and on the other over an adequate technique, that they were able to create works in which truth and beauty are one and the artistic speech exactly expresses the artistic idea. For this the painter had to command the whole resources of the science of perspective, linear and aerial, and all the technical capabilities of the many-sided processes of oil-paint. Till that stage in the development of the art was reached work was always on one side or another tentative and imperfect, but all through these long periods of endeavour there is one constant feature, and this is the effort of the artist to attain to truth in the representation of nature. No matter what was the character of his task or the material equipment of which he disposed, this ideal was for ever before his eyes, and hence it is that in the relation of the painter’s work to nature we find that permanent feature which makes the development of the art from first to last a unity.
§ 4. General Scheme of the Development of the Art.—From this point of view, that of the relation of the work of the painter to nature, we may make a rough division of the whole history of the art into four main periods.
The first embraces the efforts of the older Oriental peoples, best represented by the painting of the Egyptians; the second includes the classical and medieval epochs up to the beginning of the 15th century; the third, the 15th and 16th centuries; and the fourth the time from the beginning of the 17th century onwards.
In the first period the endeavour is after truth of contour, in the second and third after truth of form, in the fourth after truth of space.
The Egyptian artist was satisfied if he could render with accuracy, and with proper emphasis on what is characteristic, the silhouettes of things in nature regarded as little more than flat objects cut out against a light background. The Greek and the medieval artist realized that objects had three dimensions, and that it was possible on a flat surface to give an indication of the thickness of anything, that is of its depth away from the spectator, as well as its length and breadth, but they cannot be said to have fully succeeded in the difficult task they set themselves. For this there was needful an efficient knowledge of perspective, and this the 15th century brought with it. During the 15th century the painter fully succeeds in mastering the representation of the third dimension, and during the next he exercises the power thus acquired in perfect freedom, producing some of the most convincing and masterly presentments of solid ​ forms upon a flat surface that the art has to show. During this period, however, and to a more partial extent even in the earlier classical epoch, efforts were being made to widen the horizon of the art and to embrace within the scope of its representations not only solid objects in themselves, but such objects as a whole in space, in due relation to each other and to the universe at large. It was reserved, however, for the masters of the 17th century perfectly to realize this ideal of the art, and in their hands painting as an art of representation is widened out to its fullest possible limits, and the whole of nature in all its aspects becomes for the first time the subject of the picture.
§ 5. The Place of Classical Painting in the Development of the Art.—This limitation of classical painting to the representation of form may be challenged, for some hold that Greek artists not only attempted but succeeded in the task of portraying objects in space in due relation to each other and to the system of things as a whole, and that the scope of their work was as extended as that of the Italian painter of the 16th century. The view taken in this article will presently be justified, but a word may be said here as to Greek painting in general and its relation to sculpture. The main arguments in favour of the more exalted view of this phase of the art are partly based on general considerations, and partly on the existence of some examples which seem to show the artist grappling with the problems of space. The general argument, that because Greek sculptors achieved so much we must assume that the painters brought their art to the same level, is of no weight, because it has been already pointed out that painting and music are not in their development parallel to sculpture and architecture. Nothing, moreover, is really proved by the facts that painting was held by the ancients in higher estimation than its sister art, and that the painters gained great wealth and fame. Painting is a more attractive, more popular art than sculpture. It represents nature by a sort of trick or illusion, whereas sculpture with its three dimensions is more a matter of course. It is a puzzle how the object or scene, with its colours as well as its forms, can be made to appear on a few square inches of flat surface, and the artist who has the secret of the illusion is at once a man of mark. In Greece this was specially the case, because painting there made its appearance rather later than sculpture and so was from the first more conspicuous. Hence literary writers, when they refer to the arts generally, quote a painter rather than a sculptor. The people observed the painters, and these naturally made the most of themselves and of their art. The stories of the wealth and ostentation of some of these show that there was an atmosphere of reclame about the painters that must have affected the popular estimate, in an aesthetic sense, of their work. Then, too, popular criticism of painting has no standard. To the passer-by who watches the pavement artist, the result of his operations seems nature itself. “Better than I saw not who saw the truth,” writes Dante (Purg. xii. 68) of incised outlines on a pavement, that cannot go very far in natural similitude. Vasari, though a trained artist, writes as if they “vied with nature” of certain works that, though excellent for their day, do not approach the modern type. We think ourselves that Raphael’s babies are like nature till we see Correggio’s, and that Venetian Venuses are “real flesh and blood” till that of Velazquez comes to prove them paint. The fact is that the expression “true to nature” is a relative one, and very little weight should be given to a merely popular or literary judgment on a question of the kind. Hence we must not assume that because ancient painting was extravagantly praised by those who knew no other, it therefore covered all the field of the art.
§ 6. The Earliest Representative Art.—Naturalistic design of a very effective kind appears at a very early stage of human development, and is practised among the most primitive races of the actual world, such as the Australians, the Bushmen of South Africa and the Eskimo. Of the existence of such art different explanations have been offered, some finding for the representations of natural objects motives of a religious or magical kind, while others are content to see in them the expression of a simple artistic delight in the imitation of objects of interest. The extraordinary merit, within certain limits, of this early naturalistic work can be accounted for on sociological lines. As Grosse has put it (The Beginnings of Art, p. 198), “Power of observation and skill with the hand are the qualities demanded for primitive naturalistic pictorial art, and the faculty of observation and handiness of execution are at the same time the two indispensable requisites for the primitive hunter life. Primitive pictorial art, with its peculiar characteristics, thus appears fully comprehensible to us as an aesthetic exercise of two faculties which the struggle for existence has developed and improved among the primitive peoples.” So far as concerns the power of seizing and rendering the characteristics of natural objects, some of the earliest examples of representative art in the world are among the best. The objects are animals, because these were the only ones that interested the early hunter, but tens of thousands of years ago the Palaeolithic cave-dwellers of western France drew and carved the mammoth, the reindeer, the antelope, and the horse, with astonishing skill and spirit.
Fig. 6, Plate III., shows the famous sketch of a mammoth made by a prehistoric hunter and artist of western France. The tusks, the trunk, the little eye, the forehead, and especially the shaggy fell of the long-haired elephant, are all effectively rendered.
Figs. 1, 2 and 3, Plate I., show three examples of the marvellous series of prehistoric carvings and incised drawings, from the caves of southern France, published by the late Edouard Piette. We note especially the remarkable effort to portray a stag turning its head, and the close observation displayed in the representation of the action of a running buck.
Even more striking are the Palaeolithic paintings discovered in the cave of Altamira at Santillane, near Santander in Spain. These are less ancient than the carvings and sketches mentioned above, but they date from a time when what is now Great Britain was not yet divided from the continent by the Channel, when the climate of southern Europe was still cold, and when animals now extinct—such as the European bison—were still common. These paintings, boldly sketched in three colours, may be reckoned as some 50,000 years old. They display the same power of correct observation and artistic skill as the earlier carvings. Notice in the remarkable examples given on Plate II. the black patches on the bison’s winter coat and the red colour of the hide where, with the progress of the spring, he has got rid of the long hair from the more prominent parts of his body by rubbing himself against the rocks. The impressionist character of some of these sketches is doubtless partly due to the action of time; but note how, in the case of the great boar, the artist has represented the action of the legs in running as well as standing in much the same way as might be done in a rapid sketch by a modern painter. The mystery of these astounding paintings is increased by the fact that they are found in a cave to which no daylight has ever penetrated, sometimes in places almost inaccessible to sight or reach, and that they are surrounded by symbols of which none can read the meaning (see the two lozenges in fig. 3, Plate I.).
Palaeolithic art is, however, a phenomenon remote and isolated, and in the history of painting its main interest is to show how ancient is the striving of man after the accurate and spirited representation of nature. Modern savages on about the same plane of civilization do the same work, though not with equal artistic deftness, and Grosse reproduces (loc. cit., ch. vii.) some characteristic designs of Australians and Bushmen. Some of these are of single figures, but there are also “large associated groups of men and animals with the landscapes around them.” The pictures consist in outlines engraved or scratched on stone or wood or on previously blackened surfaces of hide, generally, though not always, giving profile views, and are sometimes filled in with flat tints of colour. There is no perspective, except to this extent, that objects intended to appear distant are sometimes made smaller than near ones. In the extended scenes the figures and objects are dispersed over the field, without any arrangement on planes or artistic composition, but each is delineated with spirit and in essential features with accuracy.
It is a remarkable fact, but one easily explained, that when man advances from the hunter stage to a more settled agricultural life ​
* Plate I.
* Figs. 1, 2.—HEADS OF CHAMOIS, &c., ENGRAVED ON THE TINES OF AN ANTLER.
* (From the Cave of Gourdan, Haute-Garonne, France.)
* Fig. 3.—STAGS AND SALMON. THE ORIGINALS ARE ENGRAVED ROUND AN ANTLER ABOUT AN INCH
* IN DIAMETER. (From the Grotto of Lortet, Hautes-Pyrénées, France.)
* PREHISTORIC INCISED DRAWINGS OF ANIMALS.
* Reproduced from Édouard Piette’s L’art pendant l’age du renne (Paris, 1907). By permission.
* Plate II.
* Fig. 4. Wild Boar in a Galloping and in Standing Position.
* Fig. 5. The Finest Example of a Bison.
* Reproduced by kind permission of the authors and publishers of “La Caverne d’Altamira.”
* REDUCED FACSIMILES OF PAINTINGS OF THE PALAEOLITHIC AGE FROM THE CAVE OF ALTAMIRA IN SPAIN
​ these spontaneous naturalistic drawings no longer appear. Neolithic man shows a marked advance on the capacity of his Palaeolithic predecessors in all the useful arts of life: his tools, his pottery, his weapons; but as an artist he was beyond comparison inferior. His attempts to draw men and beasts resulted in no more than conventional symbols, such as an intelligent child might scribble; of the Palaeolithic man’s taste for design, as shown in the carved work of the caves, or of his power of reproducing nature, there is not a sign. Keenness of observation and deftness of hand are no longer developed because no longer needed for the purposes of existence, and representative art almost dies out, to be, however, revived at a further stage of civilization. At this further stage the sociological motive of art is commemoration. It is in connexion with the tomb, the temple and the palace that in early but still fully organized communities art finds its field of operations. Such communities we find in ancient Egypt and Babylonia, while similar phenomena showed themselves in old Oriental lands, such as India and China.
§ 7. The Painting of Contour: Egypt and Babylonia.—In ancient Egypt we find this graphic delineation of natural objects, so spontaneous and free among the hunter tribes, reduced to a system and carried out with certain well-established conventions. The chief of these was the almost universal envisagement in profile of the subject to be represented. Only in the case of subsidiary figures might a front or a back view or a three-quarter face be essayed. To bring the human figure into profile it was conventionalized, as fig. 7, Plate III., will show. The subject is an Egyptian of high rank, accompanied by his wife and son, fowling in the marshes of the Delta. It is part of a wall-painting from a tomb at Thebes dating about 1500 B.C. The head, it will be seen, is in profile, but the eye is drawn full-face. The shoulders are shown in front view, though by the outline of the breast, with its nipple, on the figure’s right, and by the position far to the right of the navel, an indication is given that the view here is three-quarters. At the hips the figure is again in profile, and this is the position also of the legs. It will be observed that the two feet have the big toe on the same side, a device to escape the necessity of drawing the four toes as seen in the outside view of a foot. As a rule the action of these figures is made as clear as possible, and they are grouped in such a way that each is clearly seen, so that a crowd is shown either by a number of parallel outlines each a little in advance of the other suggesting a row seen in slight obliquity, or else by parallel rows of figures on lines one above the other. Animals are treated in the same way in profile, save that oxen will show the two horns, asses the two ears, as in front view, and the legs are arranged so that all are seen.
Within these narrow limits the Egyptian artist achieved extraordinary success in the truthful rendering of nature as expressed in the contours of figures and objects. If the human form be always conventionalized to the required flatness, the draughtsman is keen to seize every chance of securing variety. He fastens on the distinctive traits of different races with the zeal of a modern ethnologist, and in the case of royal personages he achieves success in individual portraiture. Though he could not render varieties of facial expression, he made the action of the limbs express all it could. The traditional Egyptian gravity did not exclude humour, and some good caricatures have been preserved. Egyptian drawing of animals, especially birds (see fig. 7, Plate III.), has in its way never been surpassed, and the specific points of beasts are as keenly noted as the racial characteristics of human beings. Animals, domestic or wild, are given with their particular gait or pose or expression, and the accent is always laid on those features that give the suggestion of strength or swiftness or lithe agility which marks the species. The precision of drawing is just as great in the case of lifeless objects, and any set of early, carefully-executed, hieroglyphic signs will give evidence of an eye and hand trained to perfection in the simpler tasks of the graphic art.
The representation of scenes, as distinct from single figures or groups, was not wholly beyond the Egyptian artist’s horizon. His most ambitious attempts are the great battle-scenes of the period of the New Empire, when a Seti or a Rameses is seen driving before him a host of routed foemen. The king in his chariot with the rearing horses is firmly rendered in the severe conventional style, but the crowd of fugitives, on a comparatively minute scale, are not arranged in the original clear fashion in parallel rows, but are tumbled about in extraordinary confusion all over the field, though always on the one flat plane. By another convention objects that cannot be given in profile are sometimes shown in ground plan. Thus a tank with trees round it will be drawn square in plan and the trees will be exhibited as if laid out flat on the ground, pointing on each side outwards from the tank.
In Babylonia and Assyria the mud-brick walls of palaces were coated with thin stucco, and this was in the interior sometimes painted, but few fragments of the work remain. On the exterior considerable use was made of decorative bands and panels of enamelled tiles, in which figure subjects were prominent, as we learn by the passage from Ezek. xxiii., about “men pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed with vermilion.” The best idea of Assyrian graphic design is gained from the slabs carved in very low relief, which contain annalistic records of the acts of the king and his people in war and peace. The human figure is treated here in a less conventional scheme, but at the same time with less variety and in a less spirited and interesting fashion than in Egypt. Of animals far fewer species are shown, but in the portrayal of the nobler beasts, notably the horse, the lion and the mastiff, there is an element of true grandeur that we seldom find in Egyptian design. Furthermore, the carver of the reliefs had a better idea of giving the impression of a scene than his brother of the Nileland, and in his representations of armies marching and fighting he introduces rivers, hills, trees, groups of buildings and the like, all of course delineated without perspective, but in far truer and more telling fashion than is the case with the scenes from the campaigns of Egyptian conquerors.
§ 8. Painting in Pre-historic Greece.—A new chapter in the history of ancient painting was opened by the discovery of relics of the art in the palaces and tombs of the Mycenaean period on the coasts and islands of the Aegean. The charming naturalistic representations of marine plants and animals on the painted vases are quite unlike anything which later Greek art has to offer, and exhibit a decorative taste that reminds us a little of the Japanese. What we are concerned with, however, are rather the examples of wall-painting in plaster found at Tiryns and Mycenae and in Crete. Of the former the first to attract notice was the well-known bull from Tiryns, represented in profile and in action, and accompanied by a human figure; but of far greater importance, because foreshadowing an advance in the pictorial art, are certain wall-paintings discovered more recently by Dr Evans at Cnossos in Crete. The question is not of the single figures in the usual profile view, like the already celebrated “Cup-bearer,” however important these may be from the historical side, but of the so-called “miniature” wall-paintings that are now preserved in the museum at Candia, in which figures on a small scale are represented not singly but in crowds and in combination with buildings and landscape features that seem to carry us forward to far more advanced stages of the art of painting. To borrow a few sentences from Dr Arthur Evans’s account of them on their first discovery (Annual of British School at Athens, vi. 46): “A special characteristic of these designs is the outline drawing in fine dark lines. This outline drawing is at the same time combined with a kind of artistic shorthand brought about by the simple process of introducing patches of reddish brown or of white on which groups belonging to one or other sex are thus delineated. In this way the respective flesh-tints of a series of men or women are given with a single sweep of the brush, their limbs and features being subsequently outlined on the background thus obtained.” There is here, it is true, no perspective, but there is a distinct effort to give the general effect of objects in a mass, which corresponds curiously with the modern development of the art of painting called “impressionism.”
§ 9. The Painting of Form: Ancient Greece and Italy.—As ​ is well known, this early civilization in the Greek world of the second millenium B.C. was almost completely swept away, probably by the political cataclysm of about 1000 B.C. known as the Dorian Migration. Hellenic art proper, in its historical continuity, represents a new start altogether and the beginnings of it need not be sought earlier than about 800 to 700 B.C. The art of painting had then completely lost touch with the graceful naturalism and with the broad generalization of the “Aegean” period, and is represented by figure designs on the so-called “geometric” or “Dipylon” vases of the most primitive kind. For a long time Greek painting is chiefly represented by work on the vases, but that this may be regarded as in the strict sense painting is shown by the fact that tablets or panels (pinakes) that would certainly be called pictures were being painted at the same time by the same technical methods, and in some cases by the same craftsman, as the vases. As Klein remarks (Euphronios,$^2$ p. 252), “the most ancient material for Greek painting is clay in the form of the vase as well as of the pinax.” Now we find in Pliny’s account of the beginnings of Greek painting (Nat. Hist. XXXV. 15 seq.) certain stages indicated in the development of technique, and we are able to illustrate these stages from vases which correspond more or less in their chronological order with the succession of the stages in Pliny. The correspondence is not exact, and there are difficulties in the way of interpreting the statements from the monuments, but the two are certainly to be brought into connexion. According to Pliny the order of development seems to be (1) outlines; (2) [a] outlines filled in with flat tints, or [b] outlines with linear inner markings but no colour. Outline drawing is obviously always the first stage in the graphic art regarded as delineation, not decoration. The flat tints without inner markings are found on “Dipylon” vases of 800–700 B.C., and as for the inner markings, though there is a difficulty in the exact interpretation of Pliny’s words, yet inner markings in the form of lines scratched on these silhouettes make their appearance very early. Two further stages are indicated by Pliny as the introduction of a red colour and the distinction between male and female figures by a painter named Eumarus of Athens. This would be by the use of white, which with red, an oxide of iron, appears on vases of about 600 B.C. Eumarus is also said to have “ventured to imitate all kinds of figures,” and we cannot fail here to be reminded of the marvellous François vase at Florence (fig. 8, Plate III.) of the first half of the 6th century, which is of large size and is decorated with a wealth of figure designs from mythological sources that are among the most remarkable productions of the graphic art in existence. Human figures and animals are there displayed in an extraordinary variety of poses and illustrating all kinds of scenes, and the execution shows a firmness of hand and patience in the rendering of details to which no praise can do justice. The inner markings are rendered by lines with the most scrupulous care and finish. Cimon of Cleonae is said to have followed Eumarus with certain improvements which are of the utmost significance for the future of the art in Greece. He is said to have introduced four innovations: (a) “Catagrapha,” which Pliny explains as “profile figures” but which must mean something more than this, seeing that profiles had been in use from the first. “Foreshortenings” is a possible and an intelligible rendering which moreover corresponds with what is further ascribed to him; (b) the representation of “countenances in different positions, looking backwards or upwards or downwards.” The other improvements, in giving (c) the details of anatomy and (d) “the wrinkles and folds of drapery,” are not of so much importance as such advance is normal and necessary. The introduction of foreshortened views is the matter of real moment, for this is the point at which Greek painting parts company with the older oriental traditions, and enters on a course of its own which leads directly to all the modern developments of the art.
The words of Pliny explaining the term “catagrapha” can be aptly illustrated from the vase paintings connected with the name of Epictetus. Epictetus was the leading figure among a company of Athenian vase decorators of the last decades of the 6th century B.C. and the beginning of the 5th, who usher in the period of the most gifted and original masters of the craft. Their work is marked by efforts to give to the human figure a vigour and expressiveness it had never before attained, and to gain their end they essay all sorts of novel and difficult problems in drawing. In connexion with Pliny’s words, Klein remarks (Euphronios, p. 47) that on their vases “the running figures look behind them; those that are jumping, revelling or fighting look up; the lifting or bending ones look down.” Some of the best vases decorated by this set of artists, who are the first to use the so-called “red-figured” technique instead of painting as the older masters had done in black on red, are for qualities of strength, variety and animation unequalled by any of their successors of the later periods, yet it is significant of the whole character of this ancient painting that they are always conspicuously more successful with profiles and objects in an upright plane at right angles to the line of sight than with any forms which involve foreshortening or perspective. They are masters of contour but are still struggling for the full command over form, and it is noteworthy that the generation of these greatest of the vase-painters had passed away before these difficulties of foreshortening had been conquered.
We have now followed on the vases the development of Greek painting up to about the time of the Persian wars, and it must be noted that in other forms, as on terra-cotta tablets or pinakes, on the flat edges of sarcophagi in the same material, and occasionally on marble slabs or stelae, the same technical characteristics are to be observed. Of painting on a monumental scale Greece proper has hitherto shown no trace, yet at this very juncture, in the decades immediately after the Persian wars, there suddenly makes his appearance one of the greatest representatives of monumental wall-painting known to the annals of the art. This is Polygnotus, who, with some worthy associates, displayed on the walls of public buildings at Athens and at Delphi a series of noble compositions on a large scale that won the admiration of the whole Hellenic community.
To find any remains of mural painting that may seem to lead up to Polygnotus and his school we have to pass beyond the bounds of Greece proper into Italy, where, alike in the Greek and Etruscan cities and also at Rome, painting in this form was practised from an early date. Pliny mentions paintings at Ardea older than the city of Rome, and some very ancient ones at Caere. Two sets of early paintings, not actually on walls but on terra-cotta slabs meant for the coating of walls, have come to light in recent times at Cervetri, the ancient Caere, some of which, in the British Museum, were dated by the late A. S. Murray at about 600 B.C. (Journal of Hellenic Studies, x. 243), while others in the Louvre may be about half a century later. True wall-paintings, of possibly a still earlier date and certainly of more primitive design, were found in the Campana tomb at Veii (Dennis, Etruria, ch. i.). The paintings from Caere are executed on a white or yellowish “slip” in a few simple colours, and exhibit single figures in a frieze-like arrangement with little attempt at action and none at grouping. The flesh of the women is left the colour of the white ground, that of the men is painted a ruddy hue. To the 6th, and first half of the 5th century, belong wall-paintings in Italian tombs, which, whether in Greek cities or in Etruscan, show distinct signs of Hellenic influence. Some of these wall-paintings (Antike Denkmäler, ii., Taf. 41–43) show considerable liveliness in colouring and in action, and a freedom and gaiety in female costume that remind us of what we read about the painting of Polygnotus (q.v.). The place of this great painter in the general history of the graphic art is given to him for his ethical greatness and the austere beauty of his single figures, which ancient writers extol. All we have to do here is fix his place in the development of painting by noting the stage at which he had arrived in the representation of nature.
The wall-paintings of Polygnotus and his school must have exhibited a large number of figures powerfully characterized in action and expression, not in a confused mass nor summarized as at Cnossus, nor grouped together as in a modern composition, ​
Plate III. :
| Fig. 6.—PREHISTORIC DRAWING OF A MAMMOTH.  Photo, Alinari. Fig. 10.— ZEUS AND HERA. POMPEIAN WALL PAINTING. | Photo, W. A. Mansell & Co. Fig. 7.—EGYPTIAN FOWLING IN THE DELTA. Photo, Alinari. Fig. 8.— FRANÇOIS VASE. Florence. |
| Photo, W. A. Mansell & Co. Fig. 11.— HEROD’S BIRTHDAY FEAST. WALL PAINTING IN CATHEDRAL AT BRUNSWICK. |||
* Plate IV.
* By permission of Braun, Clément & Co., Dornach (Alsace) and Paris.
* Fig. 12.—THE MARIES AT THE SEPULCHRE, HUBERT VAN EYCK (?). (28 ✕ 35.)
* Photo, Alinari.
* Fig. 13.—HEROD’S BIRTHDAY FEAST, GIOTTO.
nor yet arranged in formal rows one above the other, but distributed at different levels on the one plane of the picture, the levels being distinguished by summary indications of a landscape setting. Parts of some of the figures were hidden by risings of the ground. The general effect is probably represented by the paintings on the vase in the Louvre shown in fig. 4, one side of which exhibits the destruction of the children of Niobe, and the other the Argonauts. Simplicity in design and ethical dignity in the single forms are here unmistakable.
Fig. 4.—Vase painting in the Louvre, illustrating the style of Polygnotus.
It is probable that Polygnotus had not fully mastered the difficulties of foreshortening with which the early “red-figure” masters were struggling, but later designs both on vases and elsewhere do show that in the 4th century at any rate these had been overcome. The drawing on the so-called Ficoronian Cista, and on the best of the Greek mirror-backs, may be instanced. The ancients recognized that in the latter part of the 5th century B.C. painting made a great technical advance, so that all that had gone before seemed archaic, while for the first time “the gates of art” were opened and the perfect masters entered in. The advance is in the direction of the representation not of form only but of space, and seems from literary notices to have implied a considerable acquaintance with perspective science. The locus classicus, one of great importance, is in Vitruvius. In the preface to his seventh book he writes of Agatharcus, a painter who flourished at Athens in the middle and third quarter of the 5th century, that he executed a scene-painting for Aeschylus, and wrote a treatise upon it which inspired the philosophers Democritus and Anaxagoras to take up the subject, and to show scientifically from the constitution of the eye and the direction of rays of light how it was possible in scenic paintings to give sure images of objects otherwise hard to fix correctly, so that when such objects were figured on an upright plane at right-angles to the line of sight some should appear to recede and others to come forwards. It would not be easy to summarize more aptly the functions of perspective, and if philosophers of the eminence of those just mentioned worked out these rules and placed them at the disposal of the artists, the transition from ancient to modern painting should have been accomplished in the 5th century B.C., instead of just two thousand years afterwards! So far however as the existing evidence enables us to judge, this was not actually the case, and in spite of Agatharcus and the philosophers, painting pursued the even tenor of its way within the comparatively narrow limits set for it by the genius of ancient art (see Greek Art). It may be admitted that in many artistic qualities it was beyond praise. In beauty, in grace of line, in composition, we can imagine works of Apelles, of Zeuxis, of Protogenes, excelling even the efforts of the Italian painters, or only matched by the finest designs of a Raphael or a Leonardo. In the small encaustic pictures of a Pausias there may have been all the richness and force we admire in a Chardin or a Monticelli. We may even concede that the Greek artist tried at times to transcend the natural limits of his art, and to represent various planes of space in perspective, as in the landscape scenes from the Odyssey, or in figure compositions such as the “Alexander and Darius at Issus,” preserved to us in a mosaic, or the “Battle-piece” by Aristides that contained a hundred combatants. The facts, however, remain, first that the Greek pictures about which we chiefly read were of single figures, or subjects of a very limited and compact order with little variety of planes; and second, that the existing remains of ancient painting are so full of mistakes in perspective that the representation of distance cannot have been a matter to which the artists had really set themselves. The monumental evidence available on the last point is sufficient to override arguments to the contrary that may be built up on literary notices. No competent artist, or even teacher of drawing, who examines what is left of ancient painting, can fail to see that the problem of representing correctly the third dimension of space, though it may have been attacked, had certainly not been solved. It is of no avail to urge that these remains are not from the hands of the great artists but of mere decorators. In modern times the mere decorator, if he had passed through a school of art, would be as far above such childish blunders as a Royal Academician. We have only to consider dispassionately the photographic reproductions from ancient paintings (Herrmann, Denkmäler der Malereieds Altertums, Munich, 1906, &c.) to see that the perspective researches of the philosophers had not resulted in a general comprehension among the artists of the science of receding planes. For example, in the famous wall-painting of “Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida” in the House of the Tragic Poet at Pompeii, the feet of the standing figure of the goddess are nearer to the spectator than the seat of her lord, but the upper part of her form is away on the farther side of him (see fig. 5, Plate IV.). No one who could draw at all would be capable now of such a mistake. In interiors the perspective of the rafters of a roof, of a table, a stool, a throne, is in most cases faulty; and the scale of the figures seems often to be determined rather by their relative importance in the scene than by their position on the planes of the picture. In the Pompeian landscape-piece of “Paris on Mount Ida” (Herrmann, No. 8) there is no sense of the relative proportions of objects, and a cow in the foreground is much smaller than Paris, who is a long way back in the composition.
It is an additional confirmation of this view to find early Christian and early medieval painting confined to the representation of the few near objects, which the older Oriental artists had all along envisaged. If classical painters had really revolutionized design, as it was actually revolutionized in the 15th century of our era, and had followed out to their logical consequence the innovations of Agatharcus, we may be sure that the ​ influence of these innovations would not have been wholly lost even in the general decline of the arts at the break-up of the Roman Empire of the West. In any case, the influence would have survived in Byzantine art, where there was no such cataclysm. Yet we fail to see in the numerous pictorial miniatures from the 5th century onwards, or in the mosaics or the wall-paintings of the same epoch, any more effective grasp of the facts of the third dimension of space than was possessed by the pre-classical Egyptian.
All through the middle ages, therefore, the facts concerning painting with which we are here concerned remain the same, and the art appears almost exclusively concerned with the few selected objects and the single plane. The representation is at most of form and not of space.
§ 10. Early Christian and Early Medieval Painting.—The extant remains of early Christian painting may be considered under three heads: (1) the wall-paintings in the catacombs; (2) the pictorial decorations in books; (3) the mosaic pictures on the walls of the churches, (1) The first are in themselves of little importance, but are of historical interest as a link of connexion between the wall-painting of classical times and the more distinctively Christian forms of the art. They are slightly executed and on a small scale, the earliest, as being more near to classical models, are artistically the best. (2) That form of painting devoted to the decoration and illustration of books belongs more to the art of ornament than to painting proper (see Illuminated MSS. and Illustration). (3) Early Christian mosaics are noble monuments of the graphic art, and are its best representatives during the centuries from the 5th to the 8th. A dignified simplicity in design suits their large scale and architectural setting, and the aim of the artist is to present in forms of epic grandeur the personages of the sacred narratives. They are shown as in repose or engaged in some typical but simple action; the backgrounds being as a rule plain blue or gold and the accessories of the simplest possible description. The finest Christian mosaic is also the earliest. It is in the apse of S. Pudentiana, Rome, and displays Christ enthroned as teacher with the Apostles seated on each side of Him. It may date from the 4th century. Next to this the best examples are at Ravenna, in the tomb of Galla Placidia, the Baptistery, S. Apollinare Nuovo and S. Vitale, dating from the 5th and 6th centuries. The picture in the baptistery of the “Baptism of Christ” is the most artistic piece of composition and pictorial effect, and next to this comes the “Good Shepherd” of the tomb of Galla Placidia. The finest single figures are those of the white-robed saints between the windows of the nave of S. Apollinare Nuovo, and the most popular representations are the two processions of male and female saints lower down on the same walls. The famous mosaics in S. Vitale depicting Justinian and Theodora with courtiers in attendance, though historically interesting, are designed in a wooden fashion, and later mosaics at Palermo, Venice, Rome and other places are as a rule rather decorative than pictorial. Where the costly material of glass mosaic was not available, the churches of this period would show mural paintings on plaster of much the same design and artistic character, though comparatively ineffective.
In monumental painting the interval between the early Christian mosaics and mural pictures and the revival of the 13th century is filled by a series of wall and ceiling paintings of Carolingian, Romanesque and early Gothic date, in Italy, Germany and England. The earliest of which account need be taken are those in the recently excavated church of S. Maria Antiqua by the Forum at Rome (Rushworth, in Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. i., London, 1902), where there is a complete and, on the whole, well-preserved series consisting for the most part in single figures and simply composed scenes. Most of the work can be dated to the time of Pope John VII. at the beginning of the 8th century. Its style shows a mixture of Byzantine motives with elements that are native to Rome. It must be remembered that at the time Rome was strongly under Byzantine influence. Passing over some more fragmentary specimens, we may refer next to several series of mural paintings in and near the island of Reichenau at the western end of the lake of Constance, where a school of painting flourished in the latter part of the 10th century. The work here is quite as good as anything Italy has to show, and represents a native German style, based on early Christian tradition, with very little dependence on Byzantine models. The most interesting piece is the “Last Judgment” in the church of St George at Oberzell on Reichenau, where, in a very simple but dignified and effective form, we find the earliest existing representation of this standard theme of later medieval monumental art (F. X. Kraus, Wandgemälde der St Georgskirche zu Oberzell auf der Insel Reichenau, Freiburg-i.-Br., 1884).
About a hundred years later, in the latter part of the nth century, a mural painting of the same theme was executed in the church of S. Angelo in Formis near Capua in southern Italy, the style of which shows a mixture of Latin and Byzantine elements (F. X. Kraus, Die Wandgemälde von S. Angelo in Formis, Berlin, 1893).
To the middle of the 12th century belongs one of the most complete and interesting cycles of medieval wall-decoration, the display of a series of figures and scenes illustrating the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, in the chapter-house of the now secularized monastery of Brauweiler, near Cologne, in the Rhineland. Here the pictorial effect is simple, but the decorative treatment in regard to the filling of the spaces and the lines of composition is excellent. The design is Romanesque in its severity (E. Aus’m Weerth, Wandmalereien des Mittelalters in den Rheinlanden, Leipzig 1879). Romanesque also, but exhibiting an increase in animation and expressiveness, is the painting of the flat ceiling of the nave of the fine church of St Michael at Hildesheim. In the general decorative effect, the distribution of the subjects in the spaces, the blending of figures and ornament, the work, the main subject of which is the Tree of Jesse, is a masterpiece. Two nude figures of Adam and Eve are for the period remarkable productions. The date is the close of the 12th century.
Succeeding examples show unmistakable signs of the approach of the Gothic period. In the wall-paintings of the nuns’ choir of the church of Gurk in Carinthia, a certain grace and tenderness begin to make themselves felt, and the same impression we gain from the extensive cycle in the choir of the cathedral of Brunswick, from the first decades of the 13th century. The picture of Herod’s birthday feast is typical of the style of German painting of the time; there is nothing about it in the least rude or tentative. It is neither childish nor barbarous, but very accomplished in a conventional style that is exactly suited from the decorative point of view to a mural painting. The story is told effectively but in quaint fashion, and several incidents of it are shown in the same composition. There is no attempt to represent the third dimension of space, nor to give the perspective setting of the scene, but the drawing is easy and true and expressive. The studied grace in the bend of certain figures and the lively expressions of the faces are traits which prefigure Gothic art (see fig. 11, Plate III.).
Distinctively Gothic in their feeling were the wall-paintings in the chapel at Ramersdorf, opposite Bonn, dating from the beginning of the 14th century. They are only preserved in copies, but these enable us to see with what grace and feeling the slender figures were designed, how near to Angelico’s came the tender angels making music where the virgin is receiving her celestial crown (E. Aus’m Weerth, loc. cit.). From the end of the 14th century. Castle Runkelstein, near Botzen in Tirol, has preserved an extensive cycle of secular wall-paintings, much repainted, but of unique interest as giving an idea how a medieval residence of the kind might be adorned. The style is of native growth and no influence from south of the Alps is to be discerned (Janitschek, Geschichte der deutschen Malerei, Berlin, 1890, 198 seq.). Technically speaking, all these mural paintings consist in little more than outlines filled in with flat tints, neither modelling of the forms nor perspective effect in the setting is attempted, but the work so far as it goes is wholly satisfactory.
Plate V.
Plate VI.
​ gestures or expressions that offends the eye. The colours are bright and pure, the decorative effect often charming.
In the matter of panel paintings on wood, we have the interesting notice in Bede that Abbot Benedict of Wearmouth at the end of the 7th century brought from Italy portable pictures on wooden panels for the decoration of his church, part of which still remains. The style of the painting on these, it has recently been noticed, would resemble the existing wall-paintings of the beginning of the 8th century in S. Maria Antiqua in Rome, already referred to. Movable panel pictures in the form of representations of the Madonna and Child were produced in immense numbers at Byzantium and were imported largely into Italy, where they became of importance in connexion with the revival of painting in the 13th century. As a rule, however, paintings on panel were not movable but were attached to a screen, a door, or similar structure of wood consisting in framing and panels. This form of decoration is of special importance as it is really the origin of the modern picture. The painted panel, which at first forms an integral part of an architecturally designed structure of wood, gradually comes to attract to itself more and more importance, till it finally issues from its original setting and, emancipated from all relations to its surroundings, claims attention to itself as an independent work of art.
Painted panels in an architectural setting were used for the decoration of altar-fronts or antependia, of altar-backs or, as they are commonly called, altar-pieces, choir-screens, doors of presses and the like; or again for ceilings. There was painting also on the large wooden crucifixes displayed in churches, where a picture of Christ on the Cross might take the place of the more life-like carved image. In Italy painted panels were used as decoration of furniture, notably of the large carved chests or cassoni so common at the epoch of the Renaissance.
Examples of early medieval date do not appear to have survived. In Germany, where, as has been noticed, the arts in the 11th and 12th centuries stood at a higher level than in Italy or elsewhere in the west, certain antependia or altar-fronts from Soest in Westphalia of the 12th century are said to be the earliest known examples of German panel painting. One is preserved in the museum at Berlin. A little later the number of such panels introduced as part of the decoration of altar-backs, generally with folding doors, becomes very great. Painted panels as part of the decoration of screens are preserved in the choir at Cologne from the middle of the 14th century. In Italy the painted crucifix shared popular favour with the imported or imitated Byzantine Madonna-panels. A good example of the early painted altar-screen is preserved in Westminster Abbey.
Later, in the 15th century, the painted panel, generally with a single figure of a saint, becomes a common part of the carved, painted and gilded chancel screen in English churches, and many specimens are still to be seen, especially in East Anglia.
§ 11. Beginnings of the Picture: German and Early Flemish Panel Painting.—From the decorative panels introduced into wooden screen-work was developed in Germany and Flanders the picture proper, the mural painting passing out of use owing to the prevalence in the north of Gothic architecture, which does not admit of wall spaces for the display of pictures, but substitutes as a form of painting the stained-glass window. In Italy, where Gothic was treated as a plaything, the wall spaces were never sacrificed, and in the development of the art the mural picture took the lead, the painted panel remaining on the whole of secondary importance.
Priority in this development of the picture is claimed in Germany for the school of Prague, where a gild of painters was founded in 1348, but the first northern school of painting that influenced other schools and plays a part in the history of painting as a whole is the so-called school of Cologne, where painters such as Meister Wilhelm and Hermann Wynrich achieved reputation in the 14th century, and produced as their successor in the 15th Stephan Lochner, author of the so-called “Dombild” in the cathedral, and of the “Virgin of the Priests’ Seminary.” A little later than the earliest Cologne masters appears Hubert van Eyck, born near Maestricht at no great distance from the Rhineland capital, who with his younger brother, Jan, heads the Early Flemish school of painting. Hubert is one of the great names in the history of the art, and is chiefly responsible for the altar-piece of the “Adoration of the Lamb” at Ghent, the most important masterpiece of the northern schools before the 17th century, and the earliest monument of the then newly developed art of oil painting. Table No. I. in Part II. of this article gives the names of the chief successors of the Van Eycks, and the school ends with the life and work of Quintin Matsys of Antwerp, in the first quarter of the 16th century. The spirit of the early Cologne school, and in the main of that of Flanders, is idyllic and devotional, but the artists of the latter school achieve extraordinary force and precision in their representation of the facts of nature. They are, moreover, the first painters of landscape, for in their hands the gold background of the medieval panels yields place to a rendering of natural scenery and of effects of distance, minute in details and fresh and delightful in feeling. The famous picture ascribed by some to Hubert van Eyck in the collection of Sir Francis Cook at Richmond is a good example. The subject is the “Three Maries at the Sepulchre,” and the background is a wonderful view of a city intended for Jerusalem (see fig. 12, Plate IV.).
In Germany, on the other hand, the tendency of the 15th century was towards a rather crude realism in details, to which the higher artistic qualities of beauty and devotional sentiment were often sacrificed. This is a new phenomenon in the history of the art. In the older Oriental, the classical and the medieval phases of painting, though there is a constant effort to portray the truth of nature, yet the decorative instinct in the artist, his feeling for pattern, was a controlling element in the work, and the representation was conventionalized into a form that satisfied the ideal of beauty current at the time. Jan van Eyck was matter-of-fact in his realism, but avoided ugliness, whereas in Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries we find action and expression exaggerated to contortion and grimace, and all artistic qualities sacrificed to a mistaken idea of force. German art was, however, saved by the appearance of some artists of great genius who more than made up for the national insensibility to beauty by their earnestness and truth. Martin Schongauer of Colmar learnt his art from the painters of the Flemish Netherlands, and imbibed something of the feeling for beauty which the successors of Hubert van Eyck had never wholly lost. After Schongauer German art culminates at Nuremberg in the person of Albrecht Dürer, and a little later in that of Hans Holbein the younger. Contemporary with Dürer, Mathias Grunewald of Colmar exhibits a dramatic power in his creations that compensates for their exaggerated realism, and Bartholomäus Bruyn, of Cologne, prefigures the future success of the northern schools in portraiture. In Germany, however, the wars of religion in the 16th century checked the further growth of a national art. Holbein’s migration to England is a significant sign of this, and German art in this phase of it may be said to come to an end in the person of Adam Elsheimer of Frankfort, who introduced German painting at Rome about the year 1600.
In the Netherlands the early religious school ends, as we have seen, with Quintin Matsys, and the next generation of Flemish painters for the most part practise their art in Italy, and import Italian fashions into the painting of their own country. From the ranks of these so-called Italianizers in the Flanders of the 16th century proceeds a little later the commanding personality of Rubens.
§ 12. The Rise of Schools of Painting.—The expression “school of painting” has more than once been used; what is the meaning of it? The history of painting has hitherto been treated in the article as a development that proceeded according to a natural law of evolution in independence of individuals. In painting, however, as in all the higher operations of the arts, the initiative of the individual counts for much, and the action and reaction on each other of individuals, and those groups of individuals whom common aims and practice draw together into schools, make up for us a good part of the interest of the historical study of painting. At certain periods this particular ​ interest has been lacking. In ancient Egypt, for example, and among the older Oriental peoples generally, schools of painting in the modern sense did not exist, for the arts were carried on on traditional lines and owed little, so far as records tell, to individual initiative. In ancient Greece, on the contrary, we find ourselves at once in an atmosphere of names and achievements which give all the glamour of personal and biographical interest to the story of art. In the early Christian and early medieval periods, we return again to a time when the arts were practised in the same impersonal fashion as in the oldest days, but with the later medieval epoch we emerge once more into an era where the artist of genius, with his experiments and triumphs, his rivals and followers, is in the forefront of interest; when history is enlivened with anecdote, and takes light and shade from the changing fortunes of individuals.
There is a danger lest the human interest of such a period may lead us to forget the larger movements, impersonal and almost cosmic, which are all the time carrying these individuals and groups forward on their destined course. The history of painting cannot be understood if it be reduced to a notice, however full, of separate “schools” or to a series of biographies, fascinating as these may be made, of individual artists. Hence in what follows it is still the main course of the development of the art in its relation to nature that will be kept in view, while the information about names and dates and mutual relations of artists and schools, which is in its own way equally important, will be furnished in the tables constituting Part II. of this article.
What has just been said will prepare the reader for the fact that the first schools of painting here mentioned are those of Germany and Flanders, not those of Italy, though the latter are more important as well as actually prior in point of time.
§ 13. The Gothic Movement and the Proto-Renaissance, in their Influence on Painting north and south of the Alps.—The revival of the arts of sculpture and painting in the Italy of the last part of the 13th century was an event of capital importance, not only for that country but for the west at large. Its importance has, however, been exaggerated, when it has been said to imply the rediscovery of the arts after a period in which they had suffered an entire eclipse. So far as Italy is concerned, both sculpture and painting had in the previous period sunk to a level so low that they could hardly be said to exist, but at the same epoch in lands north of the Alps they were producing works of considerable merit. Romanesque wall-painting of the 12th century, as represented in some Rhineland churches and cloisters, is immeasurably better than anything of the same period south of the Alps. In the arts of construction and ornament the lead remained for a long time with the northern peoples, and in every branch of decorative work with the exception of mosaic the craftsmanship of Germany and France surpassed anything that native Italian workmen could produce. By the middle of the 12th century the intellectual and social activity of the French people was accompanied by an artistic movement that created the most complex and beautiful architectural monuments that the world has seen. The adornment of the great French Gothic cathedral was as artistically perfect as its fabric was noble. For one, at any rate, of the effects at which the painter aims, that of glowing and sumptuous colour, nothing can surpass the stained-glass windows of the Gothic churches, while the exteriors of the same buildings were enriched with hundreds of statues of monumental dignity endowed with a grace and expressiveness that reflect the spirit of the age.
The Gothic age in France was characterized by humanity, tenderness and the love of nature, and there are few epochs in human history the spirit of which is to us more congenial. The 12th century, which witnessed the growth of the various elements of culture that combined to give the age its ultimate character, saw also a movement of revival in another sphere. The reference is to what has been aptly termed a “Proto-Renaissance,” the characteristic of which was a fresh interest in surviving remains of classical antiquity. In more than one region of the west, where these remains were specially in evidence, this interest manifested itself, and the earliest sign of it was in Provence, the highly Romanized part of southern Gaul known par excellence as the “Provincia.” To this is due the remarkable development of decorative sculpture in the first decades of the 12th century, which gave to that region the storied portals of St Gilles, and of St Trophime at Arles. Somewhat later, in the early part of the 13th, those portions of southern Italy under the direct rule of the emperor Frederick II. presented a similar phenomenon that has been fully discussed by M. Bertaux in his L’Art dans l’Italie méridionale (Paris, 1904). There were other centres of this same movement, and a recent writer enumerates no fewer than seven. The Gothic movement proper depended in no degree on the study of the antique, and in art the ornamental forms which express its spirit are naturalistic, not classical, while the fine figure sculpture above referred to is quite independent of ancient models, which hardly existed in the central regions of France where the Gothic movement had its being. Still the proto-Renaissance can be associated with it as another phase of the same awakening of intellectual life that marked the 12th century. Provence took the lead in the literary revival of the time, and the artistic movement that followed on this was influenced by the fact of the existence in those regions of abundant remains of classical art.
The Gothic movement was essentially northern in its origin, and its influence radiated from the Île de France. What has been described as the idyllic grace, the tenderness, that mark the works of the early Cologne school, and to some extent those of the early Flemings, were Gothic in their origin, while the feeling for nature in landscape that characterizes van Eyck, and the general tendency towards a realistic apprehension of the facts of things, may also be put down to the quickening of both thought and sympathy due to the Gothic movement. Hence it is that the northern schools of painting are noticed before the Italian because they were nearer to the source of the common inspiration. All the lands of the West, however, exhibit, each in its own special forms, the same stir of a new intellectual, religious and artistic life. In Italy we meet with the same phenomena as in France, a proto-Renaissance, first in southern Italy and then, as we shall presently see, at Rome and at Pisa, and a religious and intellectual movement on Gothic lines that was embodied in the attractive personality of St Francis of Assisi. Francis was as perfect an embodiment of the Gothic temper as St Louis himself, and in his romantic enthusiasm, his tenderness, his humanity is in spirit more French than Italian.
§ 14. The Rise of the Italian Schools of Painting.—The revival of the arts in Italy in the latter part of the 13th century was the outcome of the two movements just noticed. The art of Niccola Pisano is now recognized as a phase of the proto-Renaissance of southern Italy, whence his family was derived. It represents a distinct advance on the revived classical sculpture of Provence or Campania because Niccola’s artistic personality was a strong one, and he gives to his work the impress of the individual of genius. Throughout its history Italian art depends for its excellence on this personal element, and Niccola’s achievement is epoch-making because of his personal vigour, not because he reinvented a lost art. Towards the end of the 13th century, painting began to show the results of the same renewed study of antique models, and here again the revival is connected with the names of gifted individuals. Among these the most noteworthy are the Roman Pietro Cavallini and Duccio di Buoninsegna of Siena. The condition of painting in Italy in late medieval days has already been indicated. Cavallini and Duccio now produce, in two standard forms of the art, the mural painting of the “Last Judgment” and the enthroned Madonna with angels—works characterized by good taste, by largeness and suavity of treatment, and by an execution which, if still somewhat primitive and laboured, at any rate aims at beauty of form and colour. The recently uncovered fresco of the Last Judgment by Cavallini, executed about 1293 on the western wall of S. Cecilia in Trastevere at Rome, is classical in feeling and represents an immense advance on the older rendering of the same subject in S. Angelo in Formis (see § 10). The vast ​ enthroned Madonna in the Rucellai chapel of S. Maria Novella at Florence, ascribed by Vasari to Cimabue, is now assigned by many to Duccio of Siena, and presents similar attractive qualities. Cimabue, a Florentine contemporary of Cavallini and Duccio, is famed in story as the chief representative of the painting of this period, but we possess no certain works from his hand except his mosaic at Pisa. His style would probably correspond to that of the painters just mentioned. His chief importance for our purpose resides in the fact that he was the teacher of the Florentine Giotto.
If the artists just referred to represent a revived classicism rather than a fresh and independent study of nature, Giotto is essentially a creation of the Gothic movement and his close association with the Franciscan cycle of ideas brings this fact into clearer relief. Giotto is in no way dependent on the study of the antique, but relies on his own steady and penetrating outlook upon man and upon nature. He is Gothic in his humanity, his sympathy, his love of truth, and he incorporates in his own person many of the most pleasing qualities of Gothic art as it had already manifested itself in France, while by the force of his own individual genius he raises these qualities to a higher level of artistic expression.
In the work of Giotto painting begins to enter on its modern era. The demonstrative element permanently takes the preeminence over the more decorative element we have called pattern-making. Though the pattern is always present, the elements of it become of increasing value in themselves as representations of nature, and the tendency henceforward for a couple of centuries is to exaggerate their importance so that the general decorative effect becomes subordinate. Giotto’s greatness depends on the gift he possessed for holding the balance even among opposed artistic qualities. If he was interesting and convincing as a narrator, he had a fine eye at the same time for composition and balanced his masses with unerring tact. Neither he nor any of the Florentine frescoists had much sense of colour, and at this stage of the development of painting compositions of light and shade were not thought of, but in line and mass he pleases the eye as much as he satisfies the mind by his clear statement of the meaning and intention of his figures and groups.
In putting these together he is careful above all things to make them tell their story, and primitive as he is in technique he is as accomplished in this art as Raphael himself. Moreover, he holds the balance between the tendency, always so strong among his countrymen as among the Germans, to over-emphasis of action and expression, and the grace and self-restraint which are among the most precious of artistic qualities. He never sacrifices beauty to force, nor on the other hand does he allow his sense of grace of line to weaken the telling effect of action or grouping. A good example of his style, and one interesting also from the comparative standpoint, is his fresco of “Herod’s Birthday Feast” in S. Croce at Florence (fig. 13, Plate IV.). We contrast it with the earlier wall-painting of the same subject in the cathedral at Brunswick (fig. 11, Plate III.). Giotto has reduced the number of actors to the minimum necessary for an effective presentation of the scene, but has charged each figure with meaning and presented the ensemble with a due regard for space as well as merely for form. The flatness of the older work has already been exchanged for an effective, if not yet fully correct, rendering of planes. The justice of the actions and expressions will at once strike the observer.
The Florentine school as a whole looks to Giotto as its head, because he embodies all the characteristics that made it great; but at the same time the artists that came after him in most cases failed by over-emphasis of the demonstrative element, and sacrificed beauty and sentiment to vigour and realism. The school as a whole is markedly intellectual, and as a result is at times prosaic, from which fault Giotto himself was saved by his Gothic tenderness and romance. His personality was so outstanding that it dominated the school for nearly a century. The “Giotteschi” is a name given to a number of Florentine painters whose labours cover the rest of the 14th century among whom only one, Andrea di Cione, called Orcagna, lifted himself to any real eminence.
At Siena the Gothic movement made itself felt in the next artistic generation after that of Duccio. Its chief representative was Simone Martini. With him Sienese art takes upon itself a character contrasting markedly with the Florentine. It is on the demonstrative side less intellectual, less vigorous, less secular; and a dreamy melancholy, a tenderness that is a little sentimental, take the place of the alertness and force with which the personages in Florentine frescoes are endued. On the other hand, in decorative feeling, especially in regard to colour, Sienese painting surpasses that of the Florentines. Simone was followed by a number of artists who answered to the Florentine “Giotteschi” and carry on the style through the century, but as Florence produces an Orcagna, so at Siena about the middle of the 14th century there appear in the brothers Lorenzetti two artists of exceptional vigour, who carry art into new fields. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the younger of the brothers, is specially represented by some frescoes in the Public Palace at Siena of a symbolical and didactic kind, representing Good and Bad Government, from which is selected a figure representing Peace (fig. 14, Plate V.). Sienese sentiment is here very apparent. Simone Martini’s masterpiece had been a great religious fresco of an edifying kind on the wall of the chapel, and now in the rooms devoted to the secular business of the city Lorenzetti covers the walls with four large compositions on the subject named.
The painters of the Sienese school were on the whole faithful to the style indicated, and later on in the century they extend the boundaries of their school by spreading its influence into the hill country of Umbria. In the cities of this region Taddeo di Bartoli, one of the best of the followers of Simone, worked about the end of the century, and early Umbrian art in consequence exhibits the same devotional character, the same dreaminess, the same grace and decorative charm, that are at home in Siena.
Elsewhere in Italy the art of the 14th century represents a general advance beyond the old medieval standard, but no outstanding personality made its appearance and there was nothing that can be strictly termed a revival. At Rome, where on the foundation of the noble design of Cavallini there might have been reared a promising artistic structure, the removal early in the 14th century of the papal court to Avignon in France led to a cessation of all effort.
§ 15. The Fifteenth Century, and its Influence on the Development of Painting at Florence.—We come now to what was indicated in § 4 as the third of the main periods into which the history of painting may be divided. It is that in which, by the aid of the new agency of perspective, truth of form was for the first time perfectly mastered, and an advance was made in the rendering of the truth of space.
The opening of the 15th century in Italy is the most important epoch in the whole history of painting, for it was the real beginning of the modern era. Here Florence, the first home of Renaissance culture, unmistakably assumes the lead, and the new era is again opened by the agency of an individual of genius. The father of modern painting is the Florentine Masaccio. He not only advanced the art in those qualities in which Giotto had already made it great, but pointed the way towards the representation of the third dimension of objects and of space as a whole which had for so long been almost ignored. His short life course, for he died before he was thirty, only allowed him to execute one work of the first importance, the frescoes in the Brancacci chapel of the Carmine at Florence. There in the “Tribute Money” he told the story with all Giotto’s force and directness, but with an added power in the creation of exalted types of human character, and in the presentation of solid shapes that seem to live before us. In the “Expulsion from Eden” he rose to greater heights. In the whole range of demonstrative art no more convincing, more moving, figures have ever been created than those of our first parents, Adam veiling his face in his hands, Eve throwing back her head and wailing aloud in agony, while in the foreshortened form of the angel that hovers above we ​ discern the whole future development of the art for a century to come (see fig. 15, Plate V.). Above all qualities in Masaccio’s work we are impressed with the simplicity and the ease of the work. The youthful artist possessed a reserve of power that, had he lived, would have carried him at one bound to heights that it took his actual successors in the school well nigh a century to climb.
The 15th century at Florence presents to us the picture of a progressive advance on the technical side of art, in the course of which various problems were attacked and one by one vanquished, till the form of painting in the style recognized in the school was finally perfected, and was then handed on to the great masters of expression, such as Raphael and Michelangelo, who used it as the obedient instrument of their wills. The efforts of the artists were inspired by a new intellectual and social movement of which this century was the scene. If the Gothic movement in the 14th century had inspired Giotto and Simone Martini, now it was the revived study of the antique, the true Renaissance, that was behind all the technical struggles of the artists. Painting was not, however, directly and immediately affected by the study of antique models. This was only one symptom of a general stir of intellectual life that is called by the apt term “humanism.” In the early Gothic epoch the movement had been also in the direction of humanity, that is to say, of softness in manners and of the amenities and graces of life, but it was also a strictly religious movement. Now, in the 15th century, the inspiration of thought was rather pagan than Christian, and men were going back to the ideas and institutions of the antique world as a substitute for those which the Church had provided for thirty generations. The direct influence of these studies on art was chiefly felt in the case of architecture, which they practically transformed. Sculpture was influenced to a lesser degree, and painting least of all. It was not till the century was pretty far advanced that classical subjects of a mythological kind were adopted by artists like Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo, the first figures borrowed from the antique world being those of republican worthies displayed for purposes of public edification.
The elements which the humanistic movement contributed to Florentine art are the following: (1) The scientific study of perspective in all its branches, linear and aerial, including the science of shadows. (2) Anatomy, the study of the nude form both at rest and in action. (3) Truth of fact in details in animate and inanimate subjects. (4) The technique of oil painting. It must be observed that in this work the Florentines were joined by certain painters of Umbria, who were not satisfied with the Umbro-Sienese tradition already spoken of, but allied themselves with the leaders of the advance who were fighting under the banner of Masaccio.
Of the studies mentioned above by far the most important was that of perspective. Anatomy and realism in details only represented an advance along the lines painting had been already following. The new technique of oil painting, though of immense importance in connexion with the art as a whole, affected the Florentines comparatively little. Their favourite form of painting was the mural picture, not the self-contained panel or canvas for which the oil medium was specially designed, and for mural work fresco remained always supreme (see Part III., § 35). In this mural work the introduction of scientific perspective effected something like a transformation. The essence of the work from the decorative point of view had been its flatness. It was primarily pattern-making, and nature had been represented by contours which stood for objects without giving them their full dimensions. When the artist began to introduce varying planes of distance and to gain relief by light and shade, there was at once a change in the relation of the picture to the wall. It no longer agreed in its flatness with the facts of the surface of which it formed the enrichment, but opposed these by its suggestion of depth and distance. Hence while painting as a whole advanced enormously through this effort after the truth of space, yet decorative quality in this particular form of the art proportionately suffered.
The study of perspective owed much to the architect and scholar Brunellesco, one of the oldest as well as ablest of the men in whom the new movement of the 15th century was embodied. Brunellesco taught all he knew to Masaccio, for whose genius he felt strong admiration; but the artist in whom the result of the new study is most obvious is Paolo Uccello, a painter of much power, who was born as early as 1397. Uccello, as extant works testify, sometimes composed pictures mainly with a view to the perspective effects for which they furnished the opportunity. See fig. 16, Plate V., where in a fresco of a cavalry skirmish he has drawn in foreshortened view the figure of a warrior prone on the ground, as well as various weapons and other objects under the feet of the horses. A fresco of “The Flood” at Florence is even more naive in its parade of the painter’s newly won skill in perspective science. The intarsists, or workers in inlaid woods, who were very numerous in Florence, also adopted perspective motives for their designs, and these testify to the fascination of the study during all the last part of the century and the beginning of the next.
The advance in anatomical studies may be illustrated in the person of Antonio Pollaiuolo. Masaccio had been as great in this department of the painter’s craft as in any other; and in the Adam and Eve of the “Expulsion,” and the famous nudes shown in the fresco of “Peter Baptizing,” he had given the truth of action and expression as few have been able to render it; but in the matter of scientific accuracy in detail more anatomical study was needful, and to this men like Pollaiuolo now devoted themselves. Pollaiuolo’s “Martyrdom of St Sebastian,” in the London National Gallery, is a very notable illustration of the efforts which a conscientious and able Florentine of the period would make to master these problems of the scientific side of art. (See fig. 17, Plate V.)
On the whole, however, of the men of this group it was not a Florentine but the Umbrian Piero de’ Franceschi that represents the greatest achievement on the formal side of art. His theoretical studies were profound. He wrote a treatise on perspective, representing an advance on the previous treatment of the science by Alberti; and to this study of linear perspective Piero united those of aerial perspective and the science of shadows. A fresco of his at Arezzo entitled the “Dream of Constantine” is epoch-making in presenting a night effect into the midst of which a bolt of celestial radiance is hurled, the incidence of which on the objects of the various planes of the picture has been carefully observed and accurately reproduced. (See fig. 18, Plate V.)
Piero handed on his scientific accomplishments to a pupil, also an Umbrian of Florentine sympathies, Luca Signorelli of Cortona. He achieved still greater success than Pollaiuolo in the rendering of the nude form in action, but more conspicuously than any others of this group he sacrificed beauty to truth, and the nudes in his great series of frescoes on the Last Things at Orvieto are anatomized like écorchés, and are in colour and texture positively repellent. Luca’s work is, however, of historical importance as leading on to that of Michelangelo.
A great power in the Florentine school of the 15th century was Andrea del Castagno, an artist with much of the vigour, the feeling for the monumental, of Masaccio, but without Masaccio’s saving gift of suavity of treatment. He is best represented by some single figures representing Florentine worthies, whom he has painted as if they were statues in niches. They formed part of the decoration of a villa, and are noteworthy as wholly secular in subject. There is a massiveness about the forms which shows how thoroughly the 15th century Florentines were mastering the representation of solid objects in all their three dimensions. Other painters attracted attention at the time for their realistic treatment of details. Vasari singles out Alessio Baldovinetti.
The importance for art of the Florentine school of the 15th century resides in these efforts for the perfecting of painting on the formal side, which its representatives were themselves making and were inspiring in others. The general historian of the art will dwell rather on this aspect of the work of the
Plate VII.
Plate VIII.
​ superficial observer. The Fra Angelicos, the Filippo Lippis, the Benozzo Gozzolis, the Botticellis, the Filippino Lippis of the century express pleasantly in their work various phases of feeling, devotional, idyllic or pensive, and enjoy a proportionate popularity among the lovers of pictures. Exigencies of space preclude anything more than a mention of their names, but a sentence or two must be given to a painter of the last half of the century who represents better than any other the perfection of the monumental style in fresco painting. This painter is Ghirlandajo, to whom is ascribed a characteristic saying. When disturbed in hours of work about some domestic affair he exclaimed: “Trouble me not about these household matters; now that I begin to comprehend the method of this art I would fain they gave me to paint the whole circuit of the walls of Florence with stories.” Ghirlandajo was entering into the heritage of technical knowledge and skill that had been laboriously acquired by his countrymen and their Umbrian comrades since the beginning of the century, and he spread himself upon the plastered walls of Tuscan churches with easy copiousness, in works which give us a better idea than any others of the time of how much can be accomplished in a form of art of the kind by sound tradition and a businesslike system of operation.
The mural painting of Ghirlandajo represents in its perfection one important phase of the art. It was still decorative in the sense that lime colour-washes were the natural finish of the lime plaster on the wall, and that these washes were arranged in a colour-pattern pleasing to the eye. The demonstrative element, that is, the significance of these patches of colour as representations of nature, was however in the eyes of both painter and public the matter of primary importance, and similitude was now carried as far as knowledge of anatomy and linear perspective rendered possible. Objects were rendered in their three dimensions and were properly set on their planes and surrounded with suitable accessories, while aerial perspective was only drawn on to give a general sense of space without the eye being attracted too far into the distance. As a specimen of the monumental style nothing can be better than Ghirlandajo’s fresco of the “Burial of S. Fina” at S. Gimignano in Tuscany (see fig. 19, Plate V.). We note with what architectural feeling the composition is balanced, how simple and monumental is the effect.
§ 16. The Fifteenth Century in the other Italian Schools.—It has been already noticed that the painting of the 14th century in the Umbrian cities was inspired by that of Siena. Through the 15th century the Umbrian school developed on the same lines. Its artists were as a whole content to express the placid religious sentiment with which the Sienese had inspired them, and advanced in technical matters almost unconsciously, or at any rate without making the pronounced efforts of the Florentines. While Piero de’ Franceschi and Luca Signorelli vied with the most ardent spirits among the Florentines in grappling with the formal problems of the art, their countrymen generally preserved the old flatness of effect, the quiet poses, the devout expressions of the older school. This Umbro-Sienese art produced in the latter part of the century the typical Umbrian painter Perugino, whose chief importance in the history of his art is the fact that he was the teacher of Raphael.
An Umbrian who united the suavity of style and feeling for beauty of the Peruginesques with a daring and scientific mastery that were Florentine was Piero de’ Franceschi’s pupil, Melozzo da Forlì. His historical importance largely resides in the fact that he was the first master of the so-called Roman school. As was noticed before in connexion with the early Roman master, Pietro Cavallini, the development of a native Roman school was checked by the departure of the papal court to France for the best part of a century. After the return, when affairs had been set in order, the popes began to gather round them artists to carry out various extensive commissions, such as the decoration of the walls of the newly-erected palace chapel of the Vatican, called from its founder the Sistine. These artists were not native Romans but Florentines and Umbrians, and among them was Melozzo da Forlì, who by taking up his residence permanently at Rome became the founder of the Roman school, that was afterwards adorned by names like those of Raphael and Michelangelo.
In the story of the development of Italian painting Melozzo occupies an important place. He carried further the notion of a perspective treatment of the figure that was started by Masaccio’s angel of the “Expulsion,” and preceded Correggio in the device of representing a celestial event as it would appear to a spectator who was looking up at it from below.
On the whole, the three Umbrians, Piero de’ Franceschi, with his two pupils Luca Signorelli and Melozzo, are the most important figures in the central Italian art of the formative period. There is one other artist in another part of Italy whose personality bulks more largely than even theirs, and who, like them a disciple of the Florentines, excelled the Florentines in science and power, and this is the Paduan Mantegna.
We are introduced now to the painters of north Italy. Their general character differs from that of the Umbro-Sienese school in that their work is somewhat hard and sombre, and wanting in the naïveté and tenderness of the masters who originally drew their inspiration from Simone Martini. Giotto had spent some time and accomplished some of his best work at Padua in the earliest years of the 14th century, but his influence had not lasted. Florentine art, in the more advanced form it wore in the first half of the 15th century, was again brought to it by Donatello and Paolo Uccello, who were at work there shortly before 1450. At that time Andrea Mantegna was receiving his first education from a painter, or rather impresario, named Francesco Squarcione, who directed his attention to antique models. Mantegna learnt from Donatello a statuesque feeling for form, and from Uccello a scientific interest in perspective, while, acting on the stimulus of his first teacher, he devoted himself to personal study of the remains of antique sculpture which were common in the Roman cities of north Italy. Mantegna built up his art on a scientific basis, but he knew how to inspire the form with a soul. His own personality was one of the strongest that we meet with in the annals of Italian art, and he stamped this on all he accomplished. No figures stand more firmly than Mantegna’s, none have a more plastic fullness, in none are details of accoutrement or folds of drapery more clearly seen and rendered. The study of antique remains supplied him with a store of classical details that he uses with extraordinary accuracy and effectiveness in his representations of a Roman triumph, at Hampton Court. Ancient art invested, too, with a certain austere beauty his forms of women or children, and in classical nudes there is a firmness of modelling, a suppleness in movement, that we look for in vain among the Florentines. Fig. 20, Plate VI., which shows a dance of the Muses with Venus and Vulcan, is typical. Mantegna was not only a great personality, but he exercised a powerful and wide-reaching influence upon all the art of north Italy, including that of Venice. His perspective studies led him in the same direction as Melozzo da Forlì, and in some decorative paintings in the Camera degli Sposi at Mantua he pointed out the way that was afterwards to be followed by Correggio.
Mantegna’s relations with the school of Venice introduce us to the most important and interesting of all the Italian schools save that of Florence. Venetian painting occupies a position by itself that corresponds with the place and history of the city that gave it birth. The connexions of Venice were not with the rest of Italy, but rather with the East and with Germany. Commercially speaking, she was the emporium of trade with both. Into her markets streamed the wealth of the Orient, and from her markets this was transferred across the Alps to cities like Nuremberg. From Germany had come a certain Gothic element into Venetian architecture in the 14th century, and a little later an influence of the same kind began to affect Venetian painting. Up to that time Venice had depended for her painters on the East, and had imported Byzantine Madonna pictures, and called in Byzantine mosaic-workers to adorn the walls and roof of her metropolitan church. The first sign of native activity is to be found at Murano, where, ​ in the first half of the 15th century, a German, Justus of Allemagna, worked in partnership with a Muranese family. A little later a stranger from another quarter executes important commissions in the city of the lagoons. This was an Umbrian, Gentile da Fabriano, who possessed the suavity and tenderness of his school.
The natural tendency of Venetian taste, nourished for centuries on opulent Oriental stuffs, on gold and gems, ran in the direction of what was soft and pleasing to the sense. The northern Gothic and the Umbrian influences corresponded with this and flattered the natural tendency of the people. For the proper development of Venetian painting some element of Florentine strength and science was absolutely necessary, and this was imparted to the Venetian school by Mantegna through the medium of the Bellini.
The Bellini were a Venetian family of painters, of whom the father was originally an assistant to Gentile da Fabriano, but lived for a while at Padua, where his daughter Nicolosia became the wife of Mantegna. With the two Bellini sons. Gentile and Giovanni, Mantegna became very intimate, and a mutual influence was exercised that was greatly to the benefit of all. Mantegna softened a little what has been termed his “iron style,” through the assimilation of some of the suavity and feeling for beauty and colour that were engrained in the Venetians, while on the other hand Mantegna imparted some of his own sternness and his Florentine science to his brothers-in-law, of whom the younger, Giovanni, was the formative master of the later Venetian school.
§ 17. The Painting of the Sixteenth Century: the Mastery of Form.—If we examine a drawing of the human figure by Raphael, Michelangelo, or Correggio, and compare it with the finest examples of Greek figure design on the vases, we note at once that to the ancient artist the form presented itself as a silhouette, and he had to put constraint on himself to realize its depth; whereas the moderns, so to say, think in the third dimension of space and every touch of their pencil presupposes it. The lovely “Aphrodite riding on a Swan,” on the large Greek kylix in the British Museum, is posed in an impossible position between the wing of the creature and its body, where there would be no space for her to sit. The lines of her figure are exquisite, but she is pure contour, not form. In a Raphael nude the strokes of the chalk come forward from the back, bringing with them into relief the rounded limb which grows into plastic fullness before our eyes. Whether the parts recede or approach, or sway from side to side, the impression on the eye is equally clear and convincing. The lines do not merely limit a surface but caress the shape and model it by their very direction and comparative force into relief. In other words, these 16th-century masters for the first time perfectly realize the aim which was before the eyes of the Greeks; and Raphael, who in grace and truth and composition may have been only the peer of Apelles, probably surpassed his great predecessor in this easy and instinctive rendering of objects in their solidity.
In so far as the work of these masters of the culminating period, in its relation to nature, is of this character it needs no further analysis, and attention should rather be directed to those elements in Italian design of the 16th-century which have a special interest for the after development of the art.
Not only was form mastered as a matter of drawing, but relief was indicated by a subtle treatment of light and shade. Foreshortening as a matter of drawing requires to be accompanied by correct modulation of tone and colour, for as the form in question recedes from the eye, changes of the most delicate kind in the illumination and hue of the parts present themselves for record and reproduction. The artist who first achieved mastery in these refinements of chiaroscuro was Leonardo da Vinci, while Correggio as a colourist added to Leonardesque modelling an equally delicate rendering of the modulation of local colour in relation to the incidence of light, and the greater or less distance of each part from the eye. This represented a great advance in the rendering of natural truth, and prepared the way for the masters of the 17th century. It is not only by
linear perspective, or the progressive diminution in size of objects as they recede, that the effect of space and distance can be compassed. This depends more on what artists know as “tone” or “values,” that is, on the gradual degradation of the intensity of light and shadow, and the diminishing saturation of colours, or, as we may express it in a word that is not however quite adequate, aerial perspective. That which Leonardo and Correggio had accomplished in the modelling, lighting and tinting of the single form in space had to be applied by succeeding artists to space as a whole, and this was the work not of the 16th but of the 17th century, and not of Italians but of the masters of the Netherlands and of Spain.
§ 18. The Contribution of Venice.—Before we enter upon this fourth period of the development of the art, something must be said of an all-important contribution that painting owes to the masters of Venice.
The reference is not only to Venetian colouring. This was partly, as we have seen, the result of the temperament and circumstances of the people, and we may ascribe also to the peculiar position of the city another Venetian characteristic. There is at Venice a sense of openness and space, and the artists seem anxious on their canvases to convey the same impression of a large entourage. The landscape background, which we have already found on early Flemish panels, becomes a feature of the pictures of the Venetians, but these avoid the meticulous detail of the Flemings and treat their spaces in a broader and simpler fashion. An indispensable condition however for the rich and varied effects of colour shown on Venetian canvases was the possession by the painters of an adequate technique. In the third part of this article an account is given of the change in technical methods due, not so much to the introduction of the oil medium by the Van Eycks, as to the exploitation at Venice of the unsuspected resources which that medium could be made to afford. Giovanni Bellini, not Hubert van Eyck, is really the primal painter in oils, because he was the first to manipulate it with freedom, and to play off against each other, the various effects of opaque and transparent pigment. His noble picture at Murano, representing the Doge Barbarigo adoring the Madonna, represents his art at its best (see fig. 21, Plate VI.).
Bellini rendered possible the painters of the culminating period of Venetian art, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, with others hardly less great. Giorgione was the first who made the art, as an art of paint not merely of design, speak to the soul. His melting outlines and the crisp clean touches that wake the piece to life; his glowing hues and the pearly neutrals that give them repose and quality; the intimate appeal of his dreamy faces, his refined but voluptuous forms, and the large freedom of his spaces of sky and distance, all combine to impress us with a sense of the poetry and mystery of creation that we derive from the works of no other extant painter. The “Concert” of the Louvre, fig. 22, Plate VII. is typically Giorgionesque.
Tintoretto, more intellectually profound, more passionate, writes for us his message in his stormy brush-strokes, now shaking us with terror, now lifting our souls on the wings of his imagination; but with him as with the younger master it is always the painter who speaks, and always in the terms of colour and texture and handling. Lastly, between the two, unapproachable in his majestic calm, stands Titian. Combining the poetry of Giorgione with much of Tintoretto’s depth and passion, he is the first, and still perhaps the greatest, of the supreme masters of the painter’s art. His masterpiece is the great “Presentation” of the Venice Academy, fig. 23, Plate VII. Painting, it is true, has to advance in its development beyond the ideals of Titian’s century, but it loses on the ethical side more than on the technical side it wins, and without the Venetians the world would have never known the full possibilities of the art that began so simply and at so early a stage of human civilization.
§ 19. The Fourth Period: the Realization of the Truth of Space. Changed Relation of Painting to Nature.—By the 17th century the development of painting had passed through all its stages, and the picture was no longer a mere silhouette or a transcript ​ of objects against a flat background, but rather an enchanted mirror of the world, in which might be reflected space beyond space in infinite recession. With this transformation of the picture there was connected a complete change in the relation of the artist to nature. Throughout all the earlier epochs of the art that painter had concerned himself not with nature as a whole, but with certain selected aspects of nature that furnished him with his recognized subjects. These subjects were selected on account of their intrinsic beauty or importance, and as representing intrinsic worth they claimed to be delineated in the clearest and most substantial fashion. In the 17th century, not only was the world as a whole brought within the artist’s view, but it presented itself as worthy in every part of his most reverent attention. In other words the art of the 17th century, and of the modern epoch in general, is democratic, and refuses to acknowledge that difference in artistic value among the aspects of nature which was at the basis of the essentially aristocratic art of the Greeks and Italians. It does not follow that selection is of any less importance in modern painting than it was of old; the change is that the basis of selection is not now a fixed intrinsic gradation amongst objects, but rather a variable difference dependent not on the object itself but on certain accidents of its position and lighting. The artist still demands that nature shall inspire him with her beauty, but he has learned that this beauty is so widely diffused that he may find it anywhere. It was a profound saying of John Constable that there is nothing ugly in nature, for, as he explained it, let the actual form and character of an object be what it would, the angle at which it might be viewed, and the effect upon it of light and colour, could always make it beautiful. It is when objects and groups of objects have taken on themselves this pictorial beauty, which only the artistically trained eye can discern, that the modern painter finds himself in the presence of his “subject,” and he knows that this magical play of beauty may appear in the most casual and unlikely places, in mean and squalid corners, and upon the most ordinary objects of daily life. Sometimes it will be a heap of litter, sometimes a maiden’s face, that will be touched with this pictorial charm. Things to the common eye most beautiful may be barren of it, while it may touch and glorify a clod.
The artist who was the first to demonstrate convincingly this principle of modern painting was Rembrandt. With Rembrandt the actual intrinsic character of the object before him was of small concern. Beauty was with him a matter of surface effect that depended on the combined influence of the actual local colour and superficial modelling of objects, with the passing condition of their lighting, and the greater or less clearness of the air through which they were seen. Behind the effect produced in this fortuitous fashion the object in itself vanished, so to say, from view. It was appearance that was important, not reality. Rembrandt’s art was related essentially not to things as they were but as they seemed. The artists of the 15th century, whose careful delineation of objects gives them the title of the earliest realists, portrayed these objects in precise analytical fashion each for itself. More advanced painters regarded them not only in themselves but in their artistic relations as combining beauties of form and colour that together made up a pictorial effect. Rembrandt in his later work attended to the pictorial effect alone and practically annulled the objects, by reducing them to pure tone and colour. Things are not there at all, but only the semblance or effect or “impression” of things. Breadth is in this way combined with the most delicate variety, and a new form of painting, now called “impressionism,” has come into being.
To give back nature just as she is seen, in a purely pictorial aspect, is the final achievement of the painter’s craft, but as the differences of tone and colour on which pictorial beauty depends are extremely subtle, so it is only by a skill of touch that seems like the most accomplished sleight of hand that the required illusion can be produced, and in this way the actual handling of the brush assumes in modern painting an importance which in the old days it never possessed. The effect is produced not by definite statements of form and colour, but by what Sir Charles Eastlake termed “the judicious unfinish of a consummate workman,” through which “the flat surface is transformed into space.” Frans Hals of Haarlem, who was born in 1580, was perhaps the first to reveal the artistic possibilities of a free suggestive handling in oil paint, and Van Dyck is said to have marvelled how Hals was able to sketch in a portrait “with single strokes of the brush, each in the right place, without altering them and without fusing them together.” In the wonderful late Velazquez at Vienna, the portrait of the Infant Philipp Prosper as a child of two years old, the white drapery, the minute fingers, the delicate baby face from which look out great eyes of darkest blue, are all indicated with touches so loosely thrown upon the canvas that seen near by they are all confusion—yet the life and truth are in them, and at the proper focal distance nature herself is before us. The touches combine to give the forms, the local colours, the depth, the solidity of nature, while at the same time the chief impression they convey is that of the opalescent play of changing tones and hues which, eluding the limitations of definite contours, make up to the painter’s eye the chief beauty of the external world. Moreover it will be understood that this realization of the truth of space, which is the distinguishing quality of modern painting, does not mean that the artist is always to be rendering large views of sky and plain. The gift of setting objects in space, so that the atmosphere plays about them, and their relations of tone to their surroundings are absolutely correct and convincing, is shown just as well in a group of things close at hand as in a wide landscape. The backgrounds in the pictures by Velazquez of “The Surrender of Breda” and “Don Balthazar Carlos” at Madrid are magnificent in their limitless suggestion of the free spaces of earth and sky, but the artist’s power in this respect is just as effectively shown in the creation of space in the interiors of “The Maids of Honour” and the “Spinners,” and the skill with which he brings away the hand of the sitter from his white robe, in the “Innocent X.” of the Doria Palace at Rome. The fact is that the scale on which the modern painter works, and the nature of his subjects, make no difference in the essential character of the result. A very few square feet of canvas were sufficient for Ruysdael to convey in his “Haarlem from the Dunes” the most sublime impression of infinity; and a Dutch interior by De Hooch gives us just as much feeling of air and distance as one of the vast panoramic landscapes of De Koningk or Rubens.
§ 20. Impressionism.—The term “impressionism,” much heard in artistic discussions of to-day, is said to date from a certain exhibition in Paris in 1871, in the catalogue of which the word was often used; a picture being called Impression de mon pot-à-feu, or Impression d’un chat qui se promène, &c. An influential critic summed up these impressions, and dubbed the exhibition “Salon des Impressionistes” (Muther, Modern Painting, 1896, ii. 718). It is a mistake however to suppose that the style of painting denoted by this term is an invention of the day, for, in so far as it is practised seriously and with adequate artistic powers, it is essentially the same style as that of some of the greatest 17th-century masters, such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. Modern investigation into the reasons of things has provided the system with a scientific basis and justification, and we can see that it really corresponds with the experimentally determined facts of human vision. The act of “seeing” may mean one or two different things. We may (1) allow our glance to travel leisurely over the field of vision, viewing the objects one by one, and forming a clear picture to ourselves of each in turn; or (2) we may try to take in the whole field of vision at a glance, ignoring the special objects and trying to frame before ourselves a sort of summary representation of the whole; or again, (3) we may choose a single point in the field of vision, and focus on that our attention, allowing the surrounding objects to group themselves in an indistinct general mass. We can look at nature in any one of these three ways; each is as legitimate as the others; but since in most ordinary cases we look at things in order to gain information about them, our vision is usually of the first or ​ analytical kind, in which we fix the objects successively, noting each by each their individual characteristics. As the object of painting is to reproduce what is seen as we see it, so in the majority of cases painting corresponds to this, our usual way, of viewing nature. That is to say, all painters of the early schools, and the majority of painters at all times, represent nature in a way that answers to this analytical vision. The treatment of groups of objects in the mass, though, as we have seen, occasionally essayed even In ancient times (see §§ 8, 9), does not become the painter’s ideal till the 17th century. We find then, and we find here and there through all the later periods of the art, efforts on the part of the artist to reproduce the effect of vision of the other two kinds, to show how objects look when regarded all together and not one by one, or how they look when we focus our attention on one of them but notice at the same time how all the others that are in the field of vision group themselves round in a penumbra, in which they are seen and yet not seen. The special developments of impressionistic art in recent times in France and England are dealt with in the article on Impressionism (see also the appendix to this article on Recent Schools of Painting), but it is mentioned here as a style of painting that is the logical outcome of the evolution of the art which has been traced from the earliest times to the 17th century. For the particular pictorial beauty, on which the modern painter trains his eye, is largely a beauty of relation, and depends on the mutual effect on each other of the elements in a group. Unless these are looked at in the mass their pictorial quality will be entirely missed. This word on impressionism, as corresponding to certain ways of looking at nature, is accordingly a necessary adjunct to the critique of modern painting since the 17th century.
§ 21. Painting in the Modern Schools.—The history of the art has been presented here as an evolution, the ultimate outcome of which was the impressionist painting of 17th-century masters such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. In this form of painting the artist is only concerned with those aspects of nature which give him the sense of pictorial beauty in tone and colour, and these aspects he reproduces on his canvas, not as a mere mirror would, but touched, pervaded, transfigured by his own artistic personality. It does not follow however that these particular ideals of the art have inspired modern painters as a body. No one who visits the picture exhibitions of the day, or even our galleries of older art, will fail to note that a good deal of modern painting since the 17th century has been academic and conventional, or prosaically natural, or merely popular in its appeal. With work of this kind we are not concerned, and accordingly, in the table (VIII.) which follows in Part II. of the article, the names with few exceptions are those of artists who embody the maturer pictorial aims that have been under discussion.
Of the schools of the 17th century that of Spain, owing much to the so-called Italian “naturalists,” produced the incomparable Velazquez with one or two notable contemporaries, and later on in the 18th century the interesting figure of Goya; while the influence of Velazquez on Whistler and other painters of to-day is a more important fact connected with the school than the recent appearance in it of brilliant technical executants such as Fortuny.
The schools of Flanders and of France are closely connected, and both owe much to Italian influence. The land of Italy, rather than any works of Italian painters, has been the inspiration of the so-called classical landscapists, among whom the Lorrainer Claude and the French Poussin take the rank of captains of a goodly band of followers. In figure painting the Venetians inspire Rubens, and Raphael stands at the head of the academic draughtsmen and composers of “historical” pieces who have been especially numerous in France. Rubens and Raphael together formed Le Brun in the days of Louis XIV., David and Delaroche in the two succeeding centuries, and the modern decorative figure painters, such as Baudry, whose works adorn the public buildings of France. Flemish influence is also strong in the French painting in a gallant vein of the 18th century from the serious and beautiful art of Watteau (fig. 24, Plate VIII.) to the slighter productions of a Fragonard. Van Dyck, another Fleming of genius, is largely responsible for the British portraiture of the 18th century, which is affiliated to him through Kneller and Sir Peter Lely. There is something of the courtly elegance of Van Dyck in the beautiful Gainsborough at Edinburgh representing the Hon. Mrs Graham (fig. 25, Plate VIII.). On the whole, though the representative masters of these two schools are original, or at any rate personal, in technique, they are in their attitude towards nature largely dependent on the traditions established in the great Italian schools of figure-painting of the 16th century. The contrast when we turn from France and Flanders to Holland is extraordinary. This country produced at the close of the 16th century and in the first half of the 17th a body of painters who owed no direct debt at all to Italy, and, so far as appears, would have been what they were had Titian and Raphael and Michelangelo never existed. They took advantage, it is true, of the mastery over nature and over the material apparatus of painting which had been won for the world by the Italians of the 15th and 16th centuries, but there their debt to the peninsula ended, and in their outlook upon nature they were entirely original.
The Dutch school is indeed an epitome of the art in its modern phase, and all that has been said of this applies with special force to the painting of Holland. Democratic in choice of subject, subtle in observation of tone and atmosphere, refined in colour, free and yet precise in execution, sensitive to every charm of texture and handling, the Dutch painter of the first half of the 17th century represents the most varied and the most finished accomplishment in paint that any school can show. Such work as he perfected could not fail to exercise a powerful effect on later art, and accordingly we find a current of influence flowing from Holland through the whole course of modern painting, side by side with the more copious tide that had its fountain-head in Italy. Hogarth and Chardin and Morland in the 18th century, the Norwich painters and Constable in the 19th, with the French Barbizon landscapists who look to the last as their head, all owe an incalculable debt to the sincere and simple but masterly art of the countrymen of Rembrandt.
§ 22. The Different Kinds of Painting represented in the Modern Schools.—The fact that the Dutch painters have left us masterpieces in so many different walks of painting, makes it convenient that we should add here some brief notes on characteristic modern phases of the art on which they stamped the impress of their genius. The normal subject for the artist, as we have seen, up to the 17th century, was the figure-subject, generally in some connexion with religion. The Egyptian portrayed the men and women of his time, but the pictures, through their connexion with the sepulchre, had a quasi-religious significance. The Assyrian chronicled the acts of semi-divine kings. Greek artists, whether sculptors or painters, were in the majority of cases occupied with the doings of gods and heroes. Christian art, up to the 16th century, was almost exclusively devoted to religious themes. In all this art, as well as in the more secular figure-painting of the modern schools, the personages represented, with their doings and surroundings, were of intrinsic importance, and the portrayal of them was in a measure an act of service and of honour. Portraiture is differentiated from this kind of subject-picture through stages which it would be interesting to trace, but the portrait, though secular, is always treated in such a way as to exalt or dignify the sitter. Another kind of figure-piece, also differentiated by degrees from the subject-picture of the loftier kind, is the so-called Genre Painting, in which the human actors and their goings-on are in themselves indifferent, trivial, or mean and even repellent; and in which, accordingly, intrinsic interest of subject has disappeared to be replaced by an artistic interest of a different kind. Landscape, in modern times so important a branch of painting, is also an outcome of the traditional figure-piece, for at first it is nothing but a background to a scene in which human figures are prominent. Marine Painting is a branch of landscape art differentiated from this, but supplied at first in the same way with figure-interest. ​ The origin of Animal Painting is to be sought partly in figure-pieces, where, as in Egypt and Assyria, animals play a part in scenes of human life, and partly in landscapes, in which cattle, &c., are introduced to enliven the foreground. The Hunting Picture, combining a treatment of figures and animals in action with landscape of a picturesque character, gives an artist like Rubens a welcome opportunity, and the picture of Dead Game may be regarded as its offshoot. This brings us to the important class of Still-Life Painting, the relation of which to the figure-piece can be traced through the genre picture and the portrait. As a natural scene in the background, so on the nearer planes, a judiciously chosen group of accessory objects adds life and interest to the representation of a personage or scene from human life. Later on these objects, when regarded with the eyes of an artist fully opened to the beauty of the world, become in themselves fit for artistic, aye, even ideal, treatment; and a Vollon will by the magic of his art make the interior of a huge and polished copper caldron look as grand as if it were the very vault of heaven itself.
§ 23. Portraiture.—Attention has already been called in § 7 to the skill of the Egyptian artist in marking differences of species and race in animals and men. In the case of personages of special distinction, notably kings, individual lineaments were portrayed with the same freshness, the same accent of truth. There is less of this power among the artists of Assyria. The naturalism of Cretan and Mycenaean art is so striking that we should expect to find portraiture represented among its remains, and this term may be fairly applied to the gold masks that covered the faces of bodies in the tombs opened by Dr Schliemann. In early (historical) Greek art some archaic vases show representations of named personages of the day, such as King Arkesilas of Cyrene, that may fall under the same heading, and portraiture was no doubt attempted in the early painted tombstones. The ideal character of Greek art however kept portraiture in the background till the later period after Alexander the Great, whose effigy limned by Apelles was one of the most famous pictures in antiquity. Our collections of works of classical art have been recently enriched by a series of actual painted portraits of men and women of the late classical period, executed on mummy cases in Egypt, and discovered in Graeco-Egyptian cemeteries. An attempt has been made by comparison with coins to identify some of the personages represented with members of the Ptolemaic house, including the famous Cleopatra, but it is safer to regard them, with Flinders Petrie, as portraits of ordinary men and women of the earliest centuries A.D. Technically they are of the highest interest, as will be noticed in § 42. From the artistic point of view one notes their variety, their life-like character, and the pleasing impression of the human personality which some of them afford. There are specimens in the London National Gallery and British Museum.
During the early Christian and early medieval periods portraits always existed. The effigies of rulers appeared, for example, on their coins, and there are some creditable attempts at portraiture on Anglo-Saxon pieces of money. In painting we find the most continuous series in the illuminated MSS. where they occur in the so-called dedicatory pictures, in MSS. intended for royal or distinguished persons, where the patron is shown seated in state and perhaps receiving the volume. The object here, as Woltmann says, “always appears to be to give a true portrait of the exalted personage himself” (Hist. of Painting, Eng. trans., i. 212). Julia Anicia, granddaughter of Valentinus III., in the 6th century; the Carolingian emperor, Lothair, in the 9th; the Byzantine emperors, Basil II. in the 10th, and Nikephoros Botaniates in the 11th, &c., appear in this fashion. Some famous mosaic pictures in S. Vitale, Ravenna, contain effigies of Justinian, Theodora, and the Ravennese bishop, Maximian. In very many medieval works of art a small portrait of the donor or the artist makes its appearance as an accessory.
With the rise of schools of painting in the 14th and 15th centuries, especially in the north, the portrait begins to assume greater prominence. The living personage of the day not only figures as donor, but takes his place in the picture itself as one of the actors in the sacred or historical scene which is portrayed. A good deal of misplaced ingenuity has been expended in older and more modern days in identifying by guess-work historical figures in old pictures, but there is no doubt that such were often introduced. Dante and some of his famous contemporaries make their appearance in a fresco ascribed to Giotto in the chapel of the Bargello at Florence. One is willing to see the face and form of the great Masaccio in the St Thomas with the red cloak, on the right of the group, in the fresco of the Tribute Money (see § 15). Dürer certainly paints himself as one of the Magi in his picture in the Uffizi. In Italy Ghirlandajo (see § 15) carried to an extreme this fashion, and thereby unduly secularized his biblical representations. The portrait proper, as an independent artistic creation, comes into vogue in the course of the 15th century both north and south of the Alps, and Jan van Eyck, Memlinc, and Dürer are in this department in advance of the Florentines, for whereas the latter almost confine themselves to flat profiles. Van Eyck introduces the three-quarter face view, which represents an improvement in the rendering of form. Mantegna and Antonello da Messina portray with great firmness, and to Uccello is ascribed an interesting series of heads of his contemporaries. It is Gentile and Giovanni Bellini however who may be regarded as the fathers of modern portrait painting. Venetian art was always more secular in spirit than that of the rest of Italy, and Venetian portraits were abundant. Those by Gentile Bellini of the Sultan Mahomet II., and by Giovanni of the Doge Loredano are specially famous. Vasari in his notice of the Bellini says that the Venetian palaces were full of family portraits going back sometimes to the fourth generation. Some of the finest portraits in the world are the work of the great Venetians of the 16th century, for they combine pictorial quality with an air of easy greatness which later painters find it hard to impart to their creations. Though greatly damaged, Titian’s equestrian portrait of Charles V. at Madrid (fig. 26, Plate VIII.) is one of the very finest of existing works of the kind. It is somewhat remarkable that of the other Italian painters who executed portraits the most successful was the idealist Raphael, whose papal portraits of Julius II. and Leo X. are masterpieces of firm and accurate delineation. Leonardo’s “Monna Lisa” is a study rather than a portrait proper.
The realistic vein, which, as we have seen, runs through northern painting, explains to some extent the extraordinary merit in portraiture of Holbein, who represents the culmination of the efforts in this direction of masters Like Jan van Eyck and Dürer. Holbein is one of the greatest delineators that ever lived, and in many of his portraits he not only presents his sitter in life-like fashion, but he surrounds him with accessory objects, painted in an analytical spirit, but with a truthfulness that has seldom been equalled. The portrait of Georg Gysis at Berlin represents this side of Holbein’s art at its best (fig. 27, Plate VIII.). Some fine portraits by Italianizing Flemings such as Antonio Moro (see Table I.) bring us to the notable masters in portraiture of the 17th century. All the schools of the period were great in this phase of the art, but it flourished more especially in Holland, where political events had developed in the people self-reliance and a strong sense of individuality. As a consequence the Dutch men and women of the period from about 1575 to 1675 were incessantly having their portraits painted, either singly or in groups. The so-called “corporation picture” was a feature of the times. This had for its subject some group of individuals associated as members of a company or board or military mess. Such works are almost incredibly numerous in Holland, and their artistic evolution is interesting to trace. The earlier ones of the 16th century are merely collections of single portraits each treated for itself, the link of connexion between the various members of the group being quite arbitrary. Later on efforts, that were ultimately successful, were made to group the portraits into a single composition so that the picture became an artistic whole. Frans Hals of Haarlem, one of the most brilliant painters of the impressionist school that he did much to found, achieved remarkable success in the artistic ​ grouping of a number of portraits, so that each should have the desired prominence while yet the effect of the whole was that of a unity. His masterpieces in this department in the townhall at Haarlem have never been equalled.
As portraitists the other great 17th-century masters fall into two sets, Rembrandt and Velazquez contrasting with Rubens and his pupil Van Dyck. The portraits of the two former are individualized studies in which the sitter has been envisaged in an artistic aspect, retaining his personality though sublimated to a harmonious display of tone and colour. The Flemings are more conventional, and representing rather the type than the individual, are disposed to sacrifice the individuality of the sitter to their predetermined scheme of beauty. Both Velazquez and Rubens have left portraits of Isabel de Bourbon, first wife of Philip IV. of Spain, but whereas the Spaniard’s version gives us an uncomely face but one full of character, that of the Fleming shows us merely the big-eyed buxom wench we are accustomed to meet on all his canvases. Rembrandt was much less careful than Velazquez or Holbein or Hals to preserve the individuality of the sitter. He did not however, like the Flemings, conventionalize to a type, but worked each piece into an artistic study of tone, colour and texture, in the course of which he might deal somewhat cavalierly with the actual facts of the piece of nature before him. The result, though incomparable in its artistic strength, may sometimes, in comparison with a Velazquez, seem laboured, but there is one Rembrandt portrait, that of Jan Six at Amsterdam, that is painted as directly as a Hals, and with the subtilty of a Velazquez, while it possesses a richness of pictorial quality in which Rembrandt surpasses all his ancient or modern compeers (see fig. 28, Plate IX.).
In the 18th century, though France produced some good limners and Spain Goya, yet on the whole England was the home of the best portraiture. Van Dyck had been in the service of Charles I., and foreign representatives of his style carried on afterwards the tradition of his essentially courtly art, but there existed at the same time a line of native British portraitists of whom the latest and best was Hogarth. One special form of portraiture, the miniature (q.v.), has been characteristically English throughout. The greater English and Scottish portraitists of the latter part of the 18th century, headed by Reynolds, owed much to Van Dyck, and their work was of a pronounced pictorial character. Every portrait, that is to say, was before everything beautiful as a work of art. Detail, either of features or dress, was not insisted on; and the effort was rather to generalize than to accentuate characteristic points. In a word, while the artist recognized the claims of the facts before him to adequate portrayal, he endeavoured to fuse all the elements of the piece into one lovely artistic unity, and in so doing he secured in his work the predominant quality of breadth. This style, handed on to painters of less power, died out in the first half of the 19th century in attenuated productions, in which harmony became emptiness. To this has succeeded in Britain, still the home of the best European portraiture, a more modern style, the dominant notes of which have been truth and force. While the older school was seen at its best when dealing with the softer forms of the female sex and of youth, these moderns excelled in the delineation of character in strongly-marked male heads, and some of them could hardly succeed wth a woman’s portrait. The fine appreciation of character in portraiture shown by Sir John Watson Gordon about the middle of the 19th century marked the beginning of this forcible style of the later Victorian period, a style suited to an age of keen intellectual activity, of science and of matter-of-fact. More recently still, with the rapid development in certain circles of a taste for the life of fashion and pleasure, the portrait of the showily-dressed lady has come again into vogue, and if any special influence is here to be discerned it may be traced to Paris.
§ 24. Genre Painting. The term “genre” is elliptical—it stands for genre bas, and means the “low style,” or the style in which there is no grandeur of subject or scale. A genre piece is a picture of a scene of ordinary human life without any religious or historical significance, and though it makes its appearance earlier, it was in the Netherland schools of the first half of the 17th century that it was established as a canonical form of the art. In Egypt we have seen that the subjects from human life have almost always a quasi-religious character, and the earliest examples of genre may be certain designs on early black-figured vases of the 6th century B.C. in Greece. Genre painting proper was introduced at a later period in Greece, and attracted special attention because of its contrast to the general spirit of classical art. It had a special name about which there is some difficulty but which seems to denote the same as genre bas. In early Christian and early medieval painting genre can hardly be recognized, but it makes its appearance in some of the later illuminated MSS. and becomes more common, especially north of the Alps, in the 15th century. It really begins in the treatment in a secular spirit of scenes from the sacred story. These scenes, in Italy, but still more among the prosaic artists of the north, were made more life-like and interesting when they were furnished with personages and accessories drawn from the present world. Real people of the day were as we have just seen introduced as actors in the scriptural events, and in the same way all the objects and accessories in the picture were portrayed from existing models. It was easy sometimes for the spectator to forget that he was looking at biblical characters and at saints and to take the scene from the standpoint of actuality. Rembrandt, one of whose chief titles to fame is derived from his religious pictures, often treats a Holy Family as if it were a mere domestic group of his own day. It was a change sure to come when the religious significance was abandoned, and the persons and objects reduced to the terms of ordinary life. This of course represented a break with a very long established tradition, and it was only by degrees, and in Germany and Flanders rather than in Italy, that the change was brought about. Thus for example, St Eloi, the patron of goldsmiths, might be portrayed as saint, but also as artificer with the impedimenta of the craft about him. The next stage, represented by a charming picture by Quintin Matsys at Paris, shows us a goldsmith, no longer a saint, but busy with the same picturesque accessories (fig. 29, Plate IX.). He has however his wife by his side and she is reading a missal which preserves to the piece a faint religious odour. Afterwards all religious suggestion is dropped, and we have the familiar goldsmith or money changer in his everyday surroundings, of which northern painting has furnished us with so many examples.
Genre painting, however, is something a little more special than is here implied. The term must not be made to cover all figure-pieces from ordinary life. There are pictures by the late Italian “naturalists” of this kind; Caravaggio’s “Card Players” at Dresden is a familiar example. These are too large in scale to come under this heading, and the same applies to the bodegones or pictures of kitchens and shops full of pots and pans and eatables, which, largely influenced by the Italian pictures just noticed, were common in Spain in the early days of Velazquez. Nor again are the large and showy subject pictures, which constitute the popular items in the catalogues of Burlington House and the Salon, to be classed as “genre.” The genre picture, as represented by its acknowledged masters, is small in scale, as suits the nature of its subject, but is studied in every part and finished with the most fastidious care. The particular incident or phase of life portrayed is as a rule of little intrinsic importance, and only serves to bring figures together with some variety of pose and expression and to motive their surroundings. It is rarely that the masters of genre charge their pictures with satiric or didactic purpose. Jan Steen in Holland and Hogarth in England are the exceptions that prove the rule. The interest is in the main an artistic one, and depends on the nice observance of relations of tone and colour, and a free and yet at the same time precise touch. All these qualities combine to lend to the typical genre picture an intimité, a sympathetic charm, that gives the masters of the style a firm hold on our affections. Probably the most ​
Plate IX.
Plate X.
​ excellent painters of genre are Terborch, Metsu and Brouwer, the two first painters of the life of the upper classes, the last of peasant existence in some of its most unlovely aspects. The pictures of Brouwer are among the most instructive documents of modern painting. They are all small pictures and nearly all exhibit nothing but two or three boors drinking, fighting, or otherwise characteristically employed, but the artist’s feeling for colour and tone, and above all his inimitable touch, has raised each to the rank of a masterpiece. He is best represented in the Munich Pinacotek, from which has been selected fig. 30, Plate IX. Hardly less admirable are Teniers in Flanders; De Hooch, Ver Meer of Delft, Jan Steen, A. van Ostade, in Holland, while in more modern times Hogarth, Chardin, Sir David Wilkie, Meissonier, and a host of others carry the tradition of the work down to our own day (see Table VIII.). Greuze may have the doubtful honour of having invented the sentimental figure-piece from ordinary life that delights the non-artistic spectator in our modern exhibitions.
§ 25. Landscape and Marine Painting. This is one of the most important and interesting of the forms of painting that belong especially to modern times. It is true that there is sufficient landscape in ancient art to furnish matter for a substantial book (Woermann, Die Landschaft in der Kunst der alten Völker, Munich, 1876), and the extant remains of Pompeian and Roman wall-painting contain a very fair proportion of works that may be brought under this heading. By far the most important examples are the half-dozen or so of pictures forming a series of illustrations of the Odyssey, that were found on the Esquiline at Rome in 1848, and are now in the Vatican library. As we shall see it to be the case with the landscapes of the late medieval period, these have all figure subjects on the nearer planes to which the landscape proper forms a background, but the latter is far more important than the figures. In some of these Odyssey landscapes there is a feeling after space and atmospheric effect, and in a few cases an almost modern treatment of light and shade, which give the works a prominent place among ancient productions which seem to prefigure the later developments of the art. In the rendering of landscape detail, especially in the matter of trees, nothing in antique art equals the pictures of a garden painted on the four walls of a room in the villa of Livia at Prima Porta near Rome. They are reproduced in Antike Denkmäler (Berlin, 1887, &c.). These may be the actual work of a painter of the Augustan age named Ludius or Studius, who is praised by Pliny (Hist. Nat. xxxv. 116) for having introduced a style of wall decoration in which “villas, harbours, landscape, gardens, sacred groves, woods, hills, fish-ponds, straits, streams and shores, any scene in short that took his fancy” were depicted in lively and facile fashion. Pompeian wall paintings exhibit many pieces of the kind, and we find the same style illustrated in the low reliefs in modelled stucco, of which the specimens found near the Villa Farnesina, and now in the Terme Museum at Rome, are the best known.
In medieval painting landscape was practically reduced to a few typical objects, buildings, rocks, trees, clouds, &c., which stood for natural scenery. Occasionally however in the MSS. these objects are grouped in pictorial fashion, as in a Byzantine Psalter of the 10th century in the National Library at Paris. The beginning of the 15th century may be reckoned as the time when the modern development of landscape art had its origin, and Masaccio here, as in other walks of painting, takes the lead. Throughout the century the landscape background, always in strict subordination to the figure interest, is a common feature of Flemish and Italian pictures, but, in the latter especially, the forms of natural objects are very conventional, and the impression produced on the city-loving Tuscan or Paduan of the time by mountain scenery is shown by the fact that rocks are commonly shown not only as perpendicular but overhanging. Titian is the first painter who, as mountain-bred, depicts the soaring peaks with real knowledge and affection (see the distance in fig. 22, Plate VII.), and the Venetians are the first to paint landscape with some breadth and sense of spaciousness, while, as we have seen, the Flemings, from Hubert van Eyck downwards, distinguish themselves by their minute rendering of details, in which they were followed later on by Dürer, who was fond of landscape, and by Altdorfer. Of Dürer indeed it has been said that some of his landscape sketches in water-colour are the first examples in which a natural scene is painted for its own sake alone. Some of the northern artists of the “Italianizing” school of the 16th century, such as Patinir, whom Dürer, about 1520, calls “Joachim the good landscape painter,” Paul Bril later in the century, and Adam Elsheimer, who worked at Rome about 1600, with several of their contemporaries, must not be omitted in any sketch of the history of the art. South of the Alps, the late Italian Salvator Rosa treats the wilder aspects of nature with some imaginative power, and his work, as well as the scenery of his native land, had an influence in the rapid development of landscape art in the 17th century, which was in part worked out in the peninsula. What is known as “classical landscape” was perfected in the 17th century, and its most notable masters were the Lorrainer Claude Geleé and the French Poussin and Dughet, while the Italianizing Dutch painters Both and Berchem modify the style in accordance with the greater naturalism of their countrymen.
The landscapes of Claude are characteristic productions of the 17th century, because they convey as their primary impression that of space and atmosphere. The compositions, in which a few motives such as rounded masses of foliage are constantly repeated, are conventional; and there is little effort after naturalism or variety in detail; but the pictures are full of art, and reproduce in telling fashion some of the larger and grander aspects of the material creation. There are generally figures in the foreground, and these are often taken from classical fables or from scripture, but instead of the landscape, as in older Italian art, being a background to the figures, these last come in merely to enliven and give interest to the scenery. The style, in spite of a certain conventionality which offends some modern writers on art, has lived on, and was represented in our own country by Richard Wilson, the contemporary of Reynolds; and in some of his work, notably in the Liber Studiorum, by Turner. Even Corot, though so individual a painter, owes something to the tradition of classical landscape.
The prevailing tendency of modern landscape art, especially in more recent times, has been in the direction of naturalism. Here the masters of the Dutch school have produced the canonical works that exercise a perennial influence, and they were preceded by certain northern masters such as the elder Breughel, whose “Autumn” at Vienna has true poetry; Savary, Roghman, and Hercules Seghers. Several of the Dutch masters, even before the time of Rembrandt, excelled in the truthful rendering of the scenes and objects of their own simple but eminently paintable country; but it was Rembrandt, with his pupil de Koningk and his rival in this department Jacob Ruysdael, who were the first to show how a perfectly natural and unconventional rendering of a stretch of country under a broad expanse of sky might be raised by poetry and ideal feeling to the rank of one of the world’s masterpieces of painting. Great as was Rembrandt in what Bode has called “the landscape of feeling,” the “Haarlem from the Dunes” of Ruysdael (fig. 31, Plate IX.) with some others of this artist’s acknowledged successes, surpass even his achievement.
Nearer our own time Constable caught the spirit of the best Dutch landscapists, and in robust naturalism, controlled by art and elevated to the ideal region by greatness of spirit, he became a worthy successor of the masters just named, while on the other side he furnished inspiration to the French painters of the so-called Barbizon school, and through them to many of the present-day painters in Holland and in Scotland.
To fix the place of J. M. W. Turner in landscape art is not easy, for the range of his powers was so vast that he covered the whole field of nature and united in his own person the classical and naturalistic schools. The special merits of each of these phases of the art are united in this artist’s “Crossing the Brook” in the National Gallery, that is probably the most ​ perfect landscape in the world (fig. 32, Plate IX.). In a good deal of Turner’s later work there was a certain theatrical strain, and at times even a garishness in colour, while his intense idealism led him to strive after effects beyond the reach of human art. We may however put out of view everything in Turner’s œuvre to which reasonable exception may on these grounds be taken, and there will still remain a body of work which for extent, variety, truth and artistic taste is like the British fleet among the navies of the world.
Among Turner’s chief titles to honour is the fact that he portrayed the sea in all its moods with a knowledge and sympathy that give him a place alone among painters of marine. Marine painting began among the Greeks, who were fond of the sea, and the “Odyssey” and other classical landscapes are stronger on this side than the landscapes of the Tuscans or Umbrians, who cared as little for the ocean as for the mountains. The Venetians did less for the sea in their paintings than might have been expected, and in northern art not much was accomplished till the latter part of the 16th century, when the long line of the marine painters of Holland is opened by Hendrick Cornelius Vroom, who found a worthy theme for his art in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Simon de Vlieger of Rotterdam, who was born about the beginning of the 17th century, was the master of W. Vandevelde the younger (1633–1707), who has never been equalled for his truthful representation of calm seas and shipping. He painted innumerable pictures of the sea-fights of the time between the English and the Dutch, those representing the victories of the Dutch being in Holland, while at Hampton Court the English are triumphant. There are exquisite artistic qualities in the painting of Vandevelde, who is reckoned the canonical master in this branch of art; but the few sea-pieces by Ruysdael, especially the “Dykes” of the Louvre, and the “Stormy Sea” at Berlin, exhibit the element under far more imaginative aspects. Besides Turner there are many British artists of modern days who have won fame in this branch of art that is naturally attractive to islanders.
§ 26. Animal Painting.—In all early schools of representative art from the time of the cave-dwellers downwards, the artist has done better with animals than with the human figure, and there is no epoch of the art at which the portrayal of animals has not flourished. (On Egyptian and Assyrian animals see § 7.) In Greece the representations of animals on coins are so varied and so excellent that we may be sure that the praise given to the pictures of the same creatures by contemporary artists is not overdrawn. In northern art animals have always played an important part, and the motives of medieval decoration are largely drawn from this source, while beast symbolism brings them into vogue in connexion with religious themes. In Italian and early Flemish and German art animals are as a rule only accessories, though some artists in all these schools take special delight in them; and when, early in the 17th century, they begin to take the chief place, the motive is often found in Paradise, where Adam and Eve lord it over the animal creation. If De Vlieger and Ruysdael are the first to show the sea in agitation, Rubens may have the same credit for revealing the passion and power of the animal nature in the violent actions of the combat or the chase. In this his contemporary Frans Snyders (1579–1657), and after Snyders Jan Fyt, specialized, and the first named is generally placed at the head of animal painters proper.
In Holland, in the 17th century, the animal nature presented itself under the more contemplative aspect of the ruminants in the lush water-meadows. True to their principle of doing everything they attempt in the best possible way, the Dutch paint horses (Cuyp, Wouwerman) and cattle (Cuyp, Adrian Vandevelde, Paul Potter) with canonical perfection, while Hondekoeter delineates live cocks and hens, and Weenix dead hares and moor-fowl, in a way that makes us feel that the last word on such themes has been spoken. There is a large white turkey by Hondekoeter in which the truth of mass and of texture in the full soft plumage is combined with a delicacy in the detail of the airy filaments, that is the despair of the most accomplished modern executant.
But animals have been treated more nobly than when shown in Flemish agitation or in Dutch phlegmatic calm. Leonardo da Vinci was specially famed for his horses, which he may have treated with something of the majesty of Pheidias. Dürer has a magnificent horse in the “Knight and Death,” but this is studied from the Colleoni monument. Nearer our own time the painter of Napoleonic France, Géricault, gave a fine reading, of the equine nature. Rembrandt’s drawings of lions are notable features in his work, and in our own day in France and England the lion and other great beasts have been treated with true imaginative power.
§ 27. Still-Life Painting.—Like portraiture and landscape, the painting of objects on near planes, or as it is called still-life painting, is gradually differentiated from the figure-piece which was supreme in the early, and has been the staple product in all, the schools. Just as is the case with the other subsidiary branches of painting, it appears, though only as a by-product, in the history of ancient classical painting, passes practically out of existence in medieval times, begins to come to a knowledge of itself in the 15th and 16th centuries, and attains canonicity in the Dutch school of the first half of the 17th century. Still-life may be called the characteristic form of painting of the modern world, because the intrinsic worth of the objects represented is a matter of complete indifference when compared with their artistic treatment in tone, colour and texture. By virtue of this treatment it has been noted (§§ 19, 20) that a study of a group of ordinary objects, when seen and depicted by a Rembrandt, may have all the essential qualities of the highest manifestations of the art. There is no finer Rembrandt for pictorial quality than the picture in the Louvre representing the carcase of a flayed ox in a flesher’s booth. As illustrating the principle of modern painting this form of the graphic art has a value and importance which in itself it could hardly claim. It is needless to repeat in this connexion what has been said on modern painting in general, and it will suffice here to indicate briefly the history of this particular phase of the art.
The way was prepared for it as has been noticed by the minute and forcible rendering of accessory objects in the figure-pieces and portraits of the early Flemish masters, of Dürer, and above all of Holbein. The painting of flower and fruit pieces without figure interest by Jan Breughel the younger, who was born in 1601, represents a stage onward, and contemporary with him were several other Dutch and Flemish specialists in this department, among whom Jan David de Heem, born 1603, and the rather older Willem Klaasz Heda may be mentioned. Their subjects sometimes took the form of a luncheon table with vessels, plate, fruit and other eatables; at other times of groups of costly vessels of gold, silver and glass, or of articles used in art or science, such as musical instruments and the like; and it is especially to be noted that the handling stops always short of any illusive reproduction of the actual textures of the objects, while at the same time the differing surfaces of stuffs and metal and glass, of smooth-rinded apples and gnarled lemons, are all most justly rendered. In some of these pieces we realize the beauty of what Sir Charles Eastlake has called the “combination of solidity of execution with vivacity and grace of handling, the elasticity of surface which depends on the due balance of sharpness and softness, the vigorous touch and the delicate marking—all subservient to the truth of modelling.” In this form of painting the French 18th-century artist Chardin, whose impasto was fuller, whose colouring more juicy than those of the Dutch, has achieved imperishable fame (see fig. 33, Plate X.); and the modern French, who understand better than others the technical business of painting, have carried on the fine tradition which has culminated in the work of Vollon. The Germans have also painted still-life to good result, but the comparative weakness in technique of British painters has kept them in this department rather in the background.
Part II., § 28.—Schools of Painting
[In the following Tables are included the main facts in the history of Painting since about A.D. 1000, with the artists of the first, second and third rank in their schools and periods. The relative importance of the artists is shown by the size of the capitals in which their names are printed. Facts and names of minor importance have in the interest of clearness been excluded. The names are given as commonly used, and where they differ from the headings of the separate biographical articles identification can be made by the Index. Words indicating localities are in italics.]
Part III.—The Technique of Painting
§ 29. The Materials of Painting.—Painting begins, as we have seen, on the one side in outline delineation, on the other in the spreading of a coating of colour on a surface. For both these the material apparatus is ready at hand. Drawing may have begun merely with lines in the air, but lasting designs were soon produced either by indenting or marking any soft substance by a hard point, or by rubbing away a comparatively soft substance, such as a pointed piece of burnt wood, on a rough surface of harder grain. Almost all the materials in use for drawing are of primitive origin. Charcoal, coloured earths and soft stones are natural or easily procured. Our plumbago was known to Pliny (xxxiv. 18) and to Cennino (ch. 34), but it was not in common use till modern times. The black-lead pencil is first described as a novelty in 1565 (Quellenschriften edition of Cennino, p. 143). A metal point of ordinary lead or tin was used in medieval MSS. for drawing lines on parchment, or on a wooden surface previously whitened with chalk (Theophilus, II. ch. xvii.). Silver-point drawing is only a refinement on this. The metal point is dragged over a surface of wood or parchment that has been grounded with finely powdered bonedust, or, as in modern times, with a wash of Chinese white (Cennino, ch. 6 seq.; Church, 292), and through the actual abrasion of the metal leaves a dark line in its track. Pliny knows the technique (xxxiii. 98). When a coloured fluid was at hand a pointed stick might be used to draw lines with it, but a primitive pen would soon be made from a split reed or the wing-feather of a bird.
The coating of one substance by another of which the colour is regarded from the aesthetic standpoint is the second source of the art of painting. To manipulate the coating substance so that it will lie evenly; to spread it by suitable mechanical means; and to secure its continued adherence when duly laid, are by no means difficult. Nature provides coloured juices of vegetable or of animal origin, and it has been suggested that the blood of the slain quarry or foeman smeared by the victor over his person was the first pigment. To imitate these by mixing powdered earths or other tinted substances in water is a very simple process. Certain reeds, the fibres of which spread out in water, were used as paint-brushes in ancient Egypt. A natural hare’s-foot is still employed in theatrical circles to lay on a certain kind of pigment, and no great ingenuity would be required on the part of the hunter for the manufacture of a brush from the hair or bristles of the slain beast. In the matter of securing the adhesion of the coating thus spread, nature would again be the guide. Many animal and vegetable products are sticky and ultimately dry hard, while heat or moisture thins them to convenient fluidity. Great heat makes mineral substances liquid that harden when cold. Hence binding materials offer themselves in considerable abundance, and they are of so great importance in the painter’s art that they form the basis of current classifications of the different kinds of painting.
§ 30. The Surfaces covered by the Painter.—Many important questions connected with the technique of painting depend on the nature of surfaces; for the covering coat—though from the present point of view only of interest aesthetically—may, as we have seen, originally serve a utilitarian purpose. The surface in question may be classed as follows: the human body; implements, vessels, weapons, articles of dress; objects of furniture, including books; boats and ships; walls and other parts of buildings; panels and other surfaces prepared especially or entirely to be painted on.
The differences among these from the present point of view are obvious. The body could not suitably be covered with a substance impervious to air and moisture; the coatings of a clay vessel and of a boat should on the other hand make them waterproof. The materials used in building often require protection from the weather. The painting on the prepared panel needs to resist time and any special influence due to location or climate. All such considerations are prior to the questions of colour, design, or aesthetic effect generally, in these coatings; and on them depend the binding materials, or media, with which the colouring substances are applied. The case of one particular surface much employed for pictorial display is exceptional. This is the wall-plaster so abundantly used for clothing an unsightly, rough, or perishable building material, like rubble or crude brick. This function it performs perfectly when left of its natural white or greyish hue, but its plain unbroken surface has seemed to demand some relief through colouring or a pattern, and the recognition of this led to one of the most important branches of the art, mural painting. Now lime-plaster, if painted on while it is still wet, retains upon its surface after it has dried the pigments used, although these have not been mixed with any binding material. On all other surfaces the pigments are mixed with some binding material, and on the character of this the kind of painting depends. There is thus a primary distinction between the process just referred to and all others. In the former, pigments, mixed only with water, are laid on while the plaster is wet, and from this “freshness” of the ground the process is called by an Italian term, painting “a fresco” or “on the fresh,” though in ordinary parlance the word “fresco” has come to be used as a noun, as when we speak of the “frescoes” of Giotto. Furthermore, as “fresco” is the wall-painter’s process par excellence the word is unfortunately often employed inaccurately for any mural picture, though this may have been executed by quite a different process. In contradistinction to painting “a fresco” all other processes are properly described by the Italian term “a tempera,” meaning “with a mixture.” The word is used as a noun in the sense of a substance mixed with another; but it is to be regarded as the imperative of the verb temperare, which both in Latin and Italian means “to divide or proportion duly,” “to qualify by mixing,” and generally “to regulate.” Tempera means strictly “mix,” just as “recipe,” also employed as a substantive, is an imperative meaning “take.” In ordinary parlance, however, the word tempera is confined to a certain class of binding materials to the exclusion of others, so that the more general term “media” is the best to employ in the present connexion. We go on, therefore, to consider these various media in relation to different surfaces and conditions.
§ 31. Binding Materials or Media.—The, fundamental distinction among media is their solubility or non-solubility in water, though, as will be seen presently, some possess both these qualities. The non-soluble media are (1) of mineral, (2) of vegetable origin. (1) Of the former kind are all vitreous pastes or pottery glazes, with which imperishable coloured surfaces or designs are produced on glazed tiles used in the decoration of buildings, on ceramic products, and in all processes of enamelling. Silicate of potash, employed to fix pigments on to mural surfaces of plaster in the so-called “stereochrome” or “water-glass” processes of wall painting (see § 37), is another mineral medium, so too is paraffin wax. In the process called (unscientifically) “fresco secco,” in which the painting is on dry plaster, lime is used as a binding material for the colours. Its action here is a chemical one (see § 36). (2) Non-soluble vegetable media are drying oils, resins, waxes (including paraffin wax, which is really mineral). In ancient times wax, and to some small extent also resins, were used as a protection against moisture, as in shipbuilding and some forms of wall-painting. Resins have always remained, but wax gradually went out of use in the earlier Christian centuries, and was replaced by the new medium, not used in classical times, of drying oil. In northern lands the desire to protect painted surfaces from the moisture of the air led to a more extensive use of oils and resins than in Italy; and it was in the Netherlands that in the 15th century oil media were for the first time adopted in the regular practice of painting, which they have dominated ever since.
The soluble media are of animal and vegetable origin. Egg, yolk or white, or both combined, is the chief of the former. Next in importance are size, gained by boiling down shreds of parchment, and fish glue. Egg is the chief medium in what is specially known as “tempera” painting, while for the painting ​ commonly called distemper or “gouache,” of which scene-painting is typical, size is used. Milk, ox-gall, casein and other substances are also employed. Of soluble vegetable media the most used are gums of various kinds. These are common “temperas” or tempera media, and, with glycerin or honey, form the usual binding material in what is called “water-colour” painting. Wine, vinegar, the milk of fig-shoots, &c., also occur in old recipes.
Attention must be drawn to the fact that substances can be prepared for use in painting that unite soluble and insoluble media, but can be diluted with water. These substances are known as “emulsions.” A wax emulsion, which is also called “saponified wax,” can be made by boiling wax in a solution of potash [in the proportions 100 bleached wax, 10 potash, 250 distilled water (Berger, Beiträge. i. 100)] till the wax is melted. When the solution has cooled it can be diluted with cold water. An admixture of oil is also possible. This, according to Berger, is what Pliny and Vitruvius (vii. 9, 3) call “Punic wax,” a material of importance in ancient painting.
An oil emulsion can be made by mixing drying oil with water through the intermediary of gum or yolk of egg. An intimate mechanical compound, not a chemical one, is thus effected, and the mixture can be diluted with water. If gum arabic be used the result is a “lean” emulsion of a milky-white colour, if yolk of egg a “fat” emulsion of a yellowish tint. When these wax or oil emulsions are dry they have the waterproof character of their non-soluble constituents.
Lastly, it must be noticed that certain substances used in the graphic arts—some of which possess in themselves a certain unctuousness—can be, as it were, rubbed into a suitably roughened, and at the same time yielding, ground, to which they will adhere, though loosely, without binding material. This is the case with charcoal, chalks and pencil. The same property is imparted by a little gum or starch to soft coloured chalks, with which is executed the kind of work called “pastel.” These are now also made up with an oleaginous medium and are known as “oil pastels.” Pictures can be carried out in ordinary or in oil pastels, and the work should rank as a kind of painting. The coloured films, rubbed off from the sticks of soft chalk on a suitably rough and sometimes tinted paper, are artistic in their texture and capable of producing very beautiful effects of colour. Professor Church notes also that the colours laid on in this fashion seem peculiarly durable (Chemistry, p. 293).
§ 32. The Processes of Painting: Preliminary Note.—These will be discussed from the point of view of the media employed, but certain departures from strict logical arrangement will be convenient. Thus, different processes of monumental painting on walls may be brought together though distinct media are employed. Tempera and early oil practice cannot be separated.
Painting by the use of vitreous glazes fused by heat may be noticed first, as the process comes within the scope of the article, though it has generally been applied in a purely decorative spirit, so as to be a branch of the art of ornament rather than strictly speaking of painting (see § 2).
In painting processes proper fresco takes the lead. It is in its theory the simplest of all, and at the same time it has produced some of the most splendid results recorded in the annals of the art. With the fresco process may be grouped for the sake of convenience other methods of wall-painting, which share with it at any rate some of its characteristics.
One of these subsidiary methods of wall-painting is that known as the wax process or “encaustic,” used in ancient times and revived in our own. Painting in wax, not specially on walls, was an important technique among the ancient Greeks, and the consideration of it introduces some difficult archaeological questions, at which space will not allow more than a glance. The wax used in the process, softened or melted by heat or driven by fire into the painting ground—whence the name “encaustic” or “burning in”—is really a tempera or binding material, and we are brought here to the important subject of tempera painting in general. It will have to be noticed in this connexion what were the chief binding materials used in the so-named technique in different lands at the various stages of the art, and what conditions were imposed on the artist by the nature of his materials. Lastly, there is the all-important process in which the binding materials are oils and varnishes, a process to which attaches so much historical and artistic interest, while a form of tempera painting that has been specially developed in modern times, that known as water-colour, may claim a concluding word.
§ 33. Historical Use of the Various Processes of Painting.—The extent and nature of the employment of these processes at different periods may have here a brief notice.
Tempera painting has had a far longer history and more extended use than any other. The Spaniard Pacheco, the father-in-law and teacher of Velazquez, remarks on the veneration due to tempera because it had its birthday with art itself, and was the process in which the famous ancient artists accomplished such marvels. In the matter of antiquity, painting with vitreous glazes is its only rival: glazed tiles formed, in fact, the chief polychrome decoration for the exteriors of the palaces of Mesopotamia, and were used also in Egypt; but all the wall-paintings in ancient Egypt and Babylonia and Mycenaean Greece, all the mummy cases and papyrus rolls in the first-named country are executed in tempera, and the same is true of the wall-paintings in Italian tombs. In Greece Proper paintings on terra-cotta fixed by fire were very common in the period before the Persian wars. When monumental wall-painting came to the front just after that event it was almost certainly in tempera rather than in fresco that Polygnotus and his companions executed their masterpieces. It has been doubted whether these artists painted directly on plaster or on wooden panels fixed to the wall, but the discovery in Greece of genuine mural paintings of the Mycenaean period has set these doubts at rest. In Italy tomb-paintings actually on plaster exist from the 6th century B.C. The earlier panel painters of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. also used tempera processes, though their exact media are not recorded. About the time of Alexander there seems to have been felt a demand for a style of painting in which could be obtained greater depth and brilliancy of colouring, with corresponding force in relief, than was possible in the traditional tempera; and this led to painting in a wax medium with which abundance of “body” could be secured. There are many puzzling questions connected with this ancient encaustic, but the discovery in recent years of actual specimens of the work, in the form of portraits on the late Egyptian mummy cases of the first centuries A.D. have assisted the study. Meanwhile a new technique to have been in process of evolution for use on walls, for the fresco process, in a complete or modified form, was certainly in use among the Romans.
The history of the fresco process, as will presently be seen, is somewhat puzzling. Vitruvius and Pliny knew it, and it is mentioned in the Mount Athos Handbook, which incorporates the technical traditions of the art of the Eastern Empire; it appears also to have been in use in the Christian catacombs, but was not practised by the wall painters who adorned the early medieval churches south and north of the Alps. The difficulties of the process, and another reason to be noticed directly, may have led to its partial disuse in the West, but we find it again coming into vogue in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the early Christian centuries its place was taken in the monumental decoration of walls by marble inlays, and especially by glass mosaic, which is in itself an important form of wall-painting and may have put painting on plaster, and with it the fresco process, into the shade; notice will however presently be taken of a theory that seeks to establish a close technical connexion between mosaic work and the fresco painting, which, on the decline in the later medieval period of mosaic, came forward again into prominence.
The tempera processes were accordingly in vogue in early medieval times for wall-paintings (except to some extent in the East), for portable panels, and on parchment for the decoration and illustration of manuscripts. Meanwhile the ​ use of drying oils as painting media was coming to be known, and both on plaster and on wood these were to some extent employed through the later medieval period, though without seriously challenging the supremacy of tempera. From the beginning of the 15th century, however, oil painting rose rapidly in estimation, and from the end of that century to our own time it has practically dominated the art. Wall-painting in fresco continued to be practised till the last part of the 18th century, and has been revived and supplemented by various other monumental processes in the 19th, but even for mural work the oil medium has proved itself a convenient substitute. Water-colour painting in its present form is essentially an art of the last hundred years. The old tempera processes have been partly revived in our own time for picture-painting, but the chief modern use of tempera is in scene-painting, where it is more commonly called “distemper.”
§ 34. Painting with Coloured Vitreous Pastes.—There is no single work that deals with the whole subject of this material and its different uses in transparent or opaque form in the arts, but details will be found in the special articles where these uses are described. (See Ceramics; Mosaic; Enamel; Glass, Stained.) On the subject of the substances and processes employed in the colouring of the various vitreous pastes information will be found in H. H. Cunynghame’s Art Enamelling on Metals (2nd ed., London, 1906, ch. vi.), but the subject is a large and highly technical one.
Coloured vitreous pastes are among the most valuable materials at the command of the decorative artists, and are employed in numerous techniques, as for example for the glazes of ceramic products including wall or floor tiles; for painted glass windows; for glass mosaic, and for all kinds of work in enamels. The vitreous paste is tinged in the mass with various metallic oxides, one of the finest colours being a ruby red obtained from gold. Silver gives yellow, copper a blue green, cobalt blue, chromium green, nickel brown, manganese violet, and so on. Tin in any form has the curious property of making the vitreous paste opaque. It should be understood that though the vitreous substance and the metallic oxides are essentially the same in all these processes, yet the preparation of the coloured pastes has to be specially conditioned in accordance with the particular technique in view. There are generally various ways of producing reds and blues and greens, &c., from oxides of different metals. The material is generally lustrous, and it admits of a great variety in colours, some of which are highly saturated and beautiful. It is on the lustre and colour of the substance, rather than on the pictorial designs that can be produced by its aid, that its artistic value depends; but though this implies that it comes under the heading “Ornament” rather than “Painting,” yet in certain forms and at particular periods it has been the chief medium for the production of pictorial results, and must accordingly have here a brief notice.
The difference between opaque and transparent coloured glass is the basis of a division among the arts that employ the material. If it be kept transparent the finest possible effect is obtained in the stained-glass window, where the colours are seen by transmitted light. The stained-glass window came into general use in the early Gothic period, and was a substitute for the wall-paintings which had been common in the Romanesque churches of the 11th and 12th centuries. Hence it is a form, and a very sumptuous and beautiful form, of the art of mural painting, representing that art in the later medieval buildings north of the Alps. In Italy, where the practice of wall-painting continued without a break from early medieval to Renaissance times, the stained-glass window was not a national form of art.
The most effective use of opaque coloured vitreous pastes is in ceramics (pottery) and in glass mosaic. The terra-cotta plaque, or tile-painted with designs in glazes of the kind was, as we have seen (§ 7), one of the chief forms of exterior mural decoration in ancient Mesopotamia. The best existing examples were found not long ago on the site of the ancient Susa (“Shushan the palace” of Scripture) and are now in the Louvre. Human figures, animals, and ornaments, are represented not only in lively colours but also in relief; that is to say, each separate glaze brick had its surface, measuring about 12 in. by 9 in., modelled as well as painted for the exact place it had to occupy in the design. On these bricks there are formed small ridges in relief intended to keep the different liquid glazes apart before they were fixed by vitrifaction in the kiln. Chemical analysis has shown that the yellow colour is an antimoniat of lead, the white is oxide of tin, similar to the well-known opaque white glaze used by the Della Robbia in Italy, the blues and greens are probably oxides of copper, the red a sub-oxide of copper (Semper, Der Stil, i. 332). This same region of the world has remained through all time a great centre for the production of coloured glazed tiles, but the use of “Persian,” “Moresque,” and other decorated plaques has been more ornamental than pictorial.
Glazed pottery only comes occasionally within the survey of the historian of painting. It does so in ancient Greece, because the earlier stages of the development of Greek painting can only be followed in this material; it does so, too, in a sense, in Italian faience and in some Oriental products, but these hardly fall within our view. The Greek vase was covered with a black glaze of extreme thinness and hardness, the composition of which is not known. Figure designs were painted in this on the natural clay of the vessel (see fig. 3, Plate IV.), or it was used for a background, the design being left the colour of the clay. Other colours, especially a red (oxide of iron) and white, were also employed to diversify the design and emphasize details, and these were also fixed by firing. A special kind of Greek vase was the so-called “polychrome lekuthos,” a small upright vessel, the clay of which was covered with a white “slip” on which figure designs were painted in lively tints. The technique is not quite understood, but the colours were certainly fired. There is an article on “The Technical History of White Lecythi” in the American Journal of Archaeology for 1907; the processes are not, however, analysed.
In glass mosaic thin solid slabs of coloured vitreous pastes are broken up into little cubes of 1/4 in. to 1/2 in. in size and set in some suitable cement. The artist works from a coloured drawing and selects his cubes accordingly. Any number of shades of all hues can be obtained, and the modern mosaic workers of Italy boast that they dispose of some 25,000 different tints. As it is of the essence of the work to be simple and monumental in effect, a limited palette is all that is needed; and the mosaics recently executed in St Paul’s in London are done in about thirty colours. The worker should have at hand appliances to cut to shape any particular cube wanted for a special detail.
The ancients used the art, and the finest existing ancient picture is in a mosaic, not indeed of glass pastes, but of coloured marbles. This is the famous “Battle of Issus” found at Pompeii. Glass mosaic came in under the early Roman Empire, but its chief use was in early Christian times, when it was the chief material for mural decoration of a pictorial kind. Ravenna is the place where this form of painting is most instructively represented, and the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. are the times of its greatest glory. At Rome and Constantinople there is fine early work, while that at Venice and Palermo is later. In the earliest and best examples the design is very simple, and a few monumental forms of epic dignity, against a flat background commonly of dark blue, represents the persons and scenes of the sacred narratives. The effect of colour is always sumptuous. Gold, especially for the backgrounds, is in later work freely employed.
The subject of enamel work forms the theme of a separate article. Here it need only be said that pictures can be produced by painting on a ground, generally of metal, with coloured vitreous pastes that are afterwards fixed by fusing. Limoges in France has been the great centre of the art, but enamelling loses in artistic value when a too exclusively pictorial result is aimed at.
§ 35. Fresco Painting.—Vitruvius (De Architectura, bk. vii. chs. 2, 3; age of Augustus), Mount Athos Handbook (Hermeneia, chs. 54 seq.; date uncertain but based on early tradition); Cennino ​ Cennini (Trattato della pittura, chs. 67 seq., ed. Milanesi, 1859; Eng. trans, by Christiana J. Herringham, Lond., 1899); Leon Battista Alberti (De re aedificatoria, bk. vi. ch. 9; early and middle 15th century); Vasari (Opere, ed. Milanesi, i. 181; middle of 16th century)—all refer in general terms to the fresco process, as one generally understood in their times. Armenini (Dei veri precetti della pittura; Ravenna, 1587), and Palomino (El Museo pictorico; Madrid, 1715–1724), give more detailed accounts of the actual technical procedure, of which they had preserved the tradition. Much information of the highest value and interest was collected at the time when, in the forties of the 19th century, the project for the decoration in fresco of the new English Houses of Parliament was under discussion. This is contained in various communications by Sir Charles Eastlake, Mr Charles Heath Wilson, and others, printed with the successive Reports of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts from 1842 onwards. The experience obtained in the revived modern work in fresco by Cornelius, Hess, and other German artists encouraged by King Ludwig I. of Bavaria, which began at Rome in the second decade of the 19th century, was also drawn upon for the purpose of these Reports. A useful compendium was issued at the time by W. B. Sarsfield Taylor, A Manual of Fresco and Encaustic Painting (Lond., 1843). F. G. Cremer’s Vollständige Anleitung zur Fresco-Malerei (Düsseldorf, 1891), may also be mentioned as a recent manual. The chemistry of the process is well explained by Professor Church in his Chemistry of Paints and Paintings.
The fresco process is generally regarded as a method for the production of a picture. It is better to look upon it in the first place as a colour-finish to plaster-work. What it produces is a coloured surface of a certain quality of texture and a high degree of permanence, and it is a secondary matter that this coloured surface may be so diversified as to result in a pattern or a picture.
We do not know among what people the discovery was first made that a wash of liquid pigment over a freshly laid surface of lime plaster remained permanently incorporated with it when all was dry, and added to it great beauty of colour and texture. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Mycenaean and later Greeks, the ancient Italians—all made extensive use of plaster as a coating to brickwork or masonry, but when they coloured it this was done after it was dry and with the use of some binding material or tempera.
The earliest notice of the fresco technique that we have in extant literature is contained in the third chapter of the seventh book of Vitruvius, and it is there treated as a familiar, well-understood procedure, the last stage in the construction and finish of a wall. Pliny also in several passages of his Natural History treats the technique as a matter of common knowledge. In Vitruvius the processes of plastering albaria opera are first described (vii. 2, 3), and it is provided that after the rough cast, trullissatio, there are to follow three coats of plaster made of lime and sand, each one laid on when the one below is beginning to dry, and then three of plaster in which the place of the sand is taken by marble dust, at first coarse, then finer, and in the uppermost coat of all in finest powder. It might now be (1) finished with a plain face, but one brought up to such an exquisite surface that it would shine like a mirror (chs. 3, 9); or (2) with stamped ornaments in relief or figure designs modelled up by hand; or (3) it might be completed with a coat of colour, and this would be applied by the fresco process, for which Pliny uses the formula udo illinere, “to paint upon the wet.” The reason why the pigments mixed with water only, without any gum or binding material, adhere when dry to the plaster is a chemical one. It was first clearly formulated by Otto Donner von Richter in connexion with researches he made on the Pompeian wall-paintings and published in 1868 as an appendix to Helbig’s Campanische Wandgemälde. He demonstrated that when limestone is burnt into lime all the carbonic acid is driven out of it. When this lime is “slaked” by being drenched with water it drinks this in greedily and the resultant paste becomes saturated with an aqueous solution of hydrate of lime. When this paste is mixed with sand or marble dust and laid on to the wall in the form of plaster this hydrate of lime in solution rises to the surface, and when the wet pigment is applied to this the liquid hydrate of lime or lime water, to use Professor Church’s phrasing, “diffuses into the paint, soaks it through and through, and gradually takes up carbonic acid from the air, thus producing carbonate of lime, which acts as the binding material” (Church, p. 278). It is a mistake to speak of the pigment “sinking into the wet plaster.” It remains as a fact upon the surface, but it is fixed there in a sort of crystalline skin of carbonate of lime—the element originally banished when the lime was burned—that has now re-formed on the surface of the plaster. This crystalline skin gives a certain metallic lustre to the surface of a fresco painting, and is sufficient to protect the colours from the action of external moisture, though on the other hand there are many causes chemical and physical that may contribute to their decay. If, however, proper care has been taken throughout, and conditions remain favourable, the fresco painting is quite permanent, and as Vitruvius says (vii. 3, 7), “the colours, when they have been carefully laid upon the wet plaster, do not lose their lustre but remain as they are in perpetuity . . . so that a plaster surface that has been properly finished does not become rough through time, nor can the colours be rubbed off, that is unless they have been carelessly applied or on a surface that has lost its moisture.”
In the passage from which these words are taken Vitruvius gives useful hints as to the aesthetics of the fresco technique. Italian writers on the subject, such as Vasari, are generally so taken up with the pictorial design represented on the wall that the more essential characteristics of the process in itself are lost sight of. To Vitruvius the work is coloured plaster, not a picture on plaster, and he shows how important it is that the plaster should be finished with a fine surface of gleaming white so as to light up the transparent film of colour that clothes it. It is the result of such care in classical times that a surface of Pompeian plastering, self-tinted “a fresco,” is beautiful without there being any question of pattern or design.
This beauty and polish of Pompeian, and generally of ancient Roman plaster, has recently been made the ground for calling in question the view accepted for a generation past that it was merely lime plaster painted on “a fresco,” and for substituting a totally different technical hypothesis. The reference is to the treatment of ancient wall-painting generally in the first part of Berger’s Beiträge (2nd ed., 1904, pp. 58 seq.). This writer denies that the well-known classical wall-paintings in question are frescoes, and evolves with great ingenuity a wholly new theory of this branch of ancient technique. It is his view that the plaster was prepared by a special process in which wax largely figured and which corresponds to, and indeed survives in, the so-called “stucco-lustro” of the modern Italians.
The process in question is described by L. B. Alberti (De re aedificatoria, vi. 9), who says that when the plaster wall surface has been carefully smoothed it must be anointed with a mixture of wax, resin and oil, which is to be driven in by heat, and then polished till the surface shines like a mirror. This is a classical process referred to by Vitruvius under the name “ganosis,” as applied to the nude parts of marble statues, possibly to tone down the cold whiteness of the material. Now Vitruvius, and Pliny, who probably follows him, do as a fact prescribe this same process for use on plaster, but only in the one special case of a wall painted “a fresco” with vermilion, which was not supposed to resist the action of the light unless “locked up.” in this way with a coating of this “Punic” or saponified wax. Neither writer gives any hint that the process was applied to plaster surfaces generally, or that the lustre of these was dependent on a wax polish, and Vitruvius’s description is so clear that if wax had been in use he would certainly have said so.
Vitruvius prescribes so many successive coats of plaster, each one put on before the last was dry, and on the wet uppermost coat the colouring is laid. How can we with any reason substitute for this a method in which the plaster has to be made quite dry and then treated with quite a different material and ​ process? Furthermore, Berger holds the astonishing theory that on the self-coloured surfaces of Pompeian and Roman plastered walls the colour was not applied, as in the fresco process, to the surface of the final coat, but was mixed up with the actual material of the intonaco so that this was a coat of coloured plaster. This is of course a matter susceptible of ocular proof, but the actual fragments of ancient coloured stucco referred to by Berger afford a very slender support to the hypothesis, whereas everyone who, like the present writer, possesses such fragments can satisfy himself that in almost every case the colour coat is confined to the surface. The writer has a fragment of such stucco from Rome, coloured with vermilion, and here there is clear evidence that some substance has soaked into the plaster to the depth of an eighth of an inch, as would be the case in the “ganosis” of Vitruvius. The part thus affected is yellowish and harder than the rest of the plaster. A careful chemical analysis, kindly made for the purpose of this article by Principal Laurie of Edinburgh shows that, although the small quantity of the material available makes it impossible to attain certainty, yet the substance may possibly be wax with the slight admixture of some greasy substance. On the other hand all the writer’s other specimens show the colour laid on to all appearance “a fresco.” The evidence of the coloured plaster in the house of about the 2nd century B.C. on Delos is wholly against Berger’s view. The writer has many specimens of this, and they are all without exception coloured only on the surface. It is true that there are certain difficulties connected with Pompeian fresco practice, but the description of the process as a wet process in Vitruvius and Pliny is so absolutely unmistakable that Berger’s theory must without hesitation be rejected.
The history of the fresco technique remains at the same time obscure. Here again Berger offers an interesting suggestion which cannot be passed over in silence. If the Pompeian technique, as he believes, be a wax process on dry plaster, followed by some form of tempera, how did the fresco technique, which is known both in East and West in the later medieval period, take its rise? The early medieval age was not a time when a difficult and monumental technique of the kind is likely to have been evolved, but Berger most ingeniously connects it with that of mosaic work. In mosaic the wall surface is at first rough plastered and a second and comparatively thin coat of cement is laid over it to receive and retain the cubes of coloured glass, only so much cement being laid each morning as the worker will cover with his tesserae before night. It was the practice sometimes to sketch in water-colours on the freshly laid patch of cement the design which was to be reproduced in mosaic, and Berger points to the incontestable fact if this sketch were allowed to remain without being covered with the cubes it would really be a painting in fresco. This is the way he thinks that the frescoe practice actually began, and the period would be that of the decline of mosaic work in the West as the middle ages advanced.
In spite of the attractiveness of these suggestions, we must reaffirm the view of this article that the testimony of Vitruvius is conclusive for the knowledge by the Romans of the early empire of the fresco technique. Why we do not find evidence of it far earlier cannot be determined, but it is worth noting that the success of the process depends on the plaster holding the moisture for a sufficient time, and this it can only do if it be pretty thick. In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, the plaster used as painting ground was very thin, and especially in those hot climates would never have lent itself to fresco treatment. On the other side, the decline, and perhaps temporary extinction, of the technique in the early middle ages may be reasonably explained by the general condition of the arts after the break-up of the Roman Empire of the West.
To return now to the technical questions from which this historical digression took its rise, it will be easily seen that the process of painting in fresco must be a rapid one, for it must be completed before the plaster has had time to dry. Hence only a certain portion of the work in hand is undertaken at a time, and only so much of the final coat of plaster, called by the Italians intonaco is laid by the plasterer as will correspond to the amount the artist has laid out for himself in the time allowed him by the condition of the plaster. At the end of this time the plaster not painted on is cut away round the outline of the work already finished, and when operations are recommenced a fresh patch is laid on and joined up as neatly as possible to the old. In the making of these joints the ancient plasterer seems to have been more expert than the Italians of the Renaissance, and the seams are often pretty apparent in frescoes of the 15th and 16th centuries, so that they can be discerned in a good photograph. When they can be followed, they furnish information which it is often interesting to possess as to the amount that has been executed in a single day’s work. Judging by this test, Mr Heath Wilson, in his Life of Michelangelo, computed that on the vault of the Sistine Michelangelo could paint a nude figure considerably above life size in two working days, the workmanship being perfect in every part. The colossal nude figures of young men on the cornice of the vault at most occupied four days each. The “Adam” (fig. 34, Plate X.). was painted in four or perhaps in three. A day was generally occupied by the head of such figures, which were about 10 ft. high. Raphael, or rather his pupils, it is thus calculated, painted the Incendio del Borgo, containing about 350 sq. ft., in about forty days, the group of the young man carrying his father occupying three. The group of the Three Graces in the Villa Farnesina took five days at most. Luini, a most accomplished executant, could paint “more than an entire figure, the size of life, in one day” (Second Report, p. 37). It has been noticed as one of the difficulties about the Pompeian frescoes, that joints hardly occur, or at any rate that larger surfaces of plaster were covered by the painter at a single time than was the case among Renaissance artists, and a conjectural explanation has been offered based on the fact that the ancient plaster ground, laid on in many successive coats while in each case the previous one was still humid, was thicker and would hold more moisture than the more modern intonaco, and would accordingly allow the artist longer time in which to carry out his work. Alberti, Armenini, and Palomino only contemplate one or two thin coats over the original rough cast, while Cornelius and his associates, who revived the process early in the 19th century, speak of an intonaco over the rough cast only about a quarter of an inch thick. A piece of plaster ground from Raphael’s Loggie in the Vatican was found to be quite thin, and Donner calculated that the ancient grounds were on an average 3 in. thick, the modern only a little over 1 in. On such grounds work had necessarily to be finished within the day, and Cennino expressly says (ch. 67): “Consider how much you can paint in a day; for whatever you cover with plaster you must finish the same day.” Hence almost invariably in Italian fresco practice every join means a new day’s work. At Pompeii the plaster, it is thought, might have remained damp over night. In the Mount Athos Handbook tow was to be mixed with the plaster, undoubtedly to retard its drying.
This necessarily rapid execution gives to well-handled frescoes a simplicity and look of directness in technique that are of the essence of the aesthetic effect of this form of the art. Hence Vasari is right when he extols the process in the words, “of all the ways in which painters work, wall-painting is the finest and most masterly, since it consists in doing upon a single day that which in other methods may be accomplished in several by going over again what has been done. . . . there are many of our craft who do well enough in other kinds of work, as for example in oil or tempera, but fail in this, for this is in truth the most manly, the safest, and most solid of all ways of painting. Therefore let those who seek to work upon the wall, paint with a manly touch upon the fresh plaster, and avoid returning to it when it is dry” (Opere, ed. Milanesi, i. 181).
The process gives the artist another advantage in that his painting, being executed in the very material of the surface itself, seems essentially a part of the wall. It is lime painting on a lime ground, and fabric and enrichment are one. This ​ can be noted in the Sola del Constantino in the Vatican at Rome, one of the stanze or suite of rooms decorated by Raphael and his associates. There are two figures here painted on the walls in oil, and though there is a certain depth and richness of effect secured in this medium, they are too obviously something added as an afterthought, while the figures in fresco seem an integral part of the wall.
Work of this kind, finished in each part at a sitting, is what the Italians call buon fresco or “true fresco,” and it has always been, as it was with Vitruvius, the ideal of the art, but at many periods the painters have had to rely largely on retouches and reinforcements after the plaster was dry. Cennino devotes the 67th chapter of his Trattato to a description of the process, and expressly tells us that the method he recommends is the one traditional in the school of Giotto, of which he himself was a direct scion. He is fully alive to the importance of doing as much as possible while the ground is wet, for “to paint on the fresh—that is, a fixed portion on each day—is the best and most permanent way of laying on the colour, and the pleasantest method of painting”; but an ordinary artist of the early part of the 15th century had not sufficient skill to do all that was required at the one moment. Observations made on the works executed by various Italian masters from the 14th to the 16th century show great varieties in this matter of retouching, but the subject need not be dwelt on as it involves no principle. Every painter of worthy ambition, who had entered into the spirit of his craft, would desire to do all he could “on the fresh,” and would be satisfied with, and indeed glory in, the conditions and limitations of the noble technique. Masaccio, even at the beginning of the 15th century, is remarkable for the amount of fine pictorial effect he secured without reliance on retouching. It was second-rate artists, like Pinturicchio, who delighted to furbish up their mural pictures with stucco reliefs and gilding and to add touches of more brilliant pigments than could be used in the wet process. Giotto, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Michelangelo, Luini, are among the frescanti proper, who represent the true ideals of the craft.
The following notes upon the methods of the work are derived partly from observation of extant works and partly from the older treatises, but reference has also been made to modern practice in Germany and Italy, as information derived from this last source may be found useful by those who are disposed to-day to make essays in the process.
To avoid loss of time it is essential that the necessary drawing should all be accomplished beforehand. Pozzo, a painter and writer of the end of the 17th century says, “everyone knows that before beginning to paint it is necessary to prepare a drawing and well-studied coloured sketch, both of which are to be kept at hand in painting the fresco, so as not to have any other thought than that of the execution” (First Report, p. 35). In Cennino’s time it seems to have been the practice to square out the work full size from the sketch on to the surface of the rough cast before the intonaco was laid. This at any rate enabled the artist to see how his work as a whole would come in relation to the space provided for it, but the actual intonaco had to be laid piece by piece over this general sketch and the drawing of each portion repeated on the new surface. In the palmy days of Italian painting, however, as well as in modern times, the design has been drawn out on a full-sized cartoon, and this cartoon, or a tracing from it, has been transferred piece by piece to the freshly laid intonaco on which the painting is about to be executed. The drawing may be nailed against the wall, and the outlines passed over with a blunt-pointed stylus of some hard material, that by dinting the paper impresses on the yielding plaster a line sufficient to guide the painter in his work; or the outlines of the cartoon may be pricked and “pounced” with a little bag of red or black powder that will leave a dotted outline on the wall.
The preparation of the intonaco itself is however a matter for much care. The lime should be prepared from a stone that is as far as possible pure carbonate of lime—the travertine of Tivoli, recommended by Vasari, is perfect for the purpose—and after it is burnt should be slaked with water and thoroughly macerated so that the lumps are all completely broken up. The slaked lime, of the consistency of a stiff paste, or as it is termed “putty,” must be kept covered in from the air for a considerable period that varies according to different authorities from eight to twelve months to as many years. All experts, from Vitruvius downwards, are agreed on the necessity for this, but the exact scientific reason therefor does not seem to be quite clear. One advantage of the keeping is that the lime hydrate may take up a certain amount of carbonic acid, though not too much, from the air. Church says that, “not more than one-third or at most two-fifths of the lime should be converted into the carbonate” (p. 19); but Faraday (Fifth Report, p. 25) was of opinion that through lapse of time there was brought about a molecular change that divided the particles more thoroughly and gave the lime a finer texture so as to mix better with the pigments. At any rate, when Cornelius and his associates started the modern fresco revival at Rome, in 1815, an old workman who had been employed under Raphael Mengs directed their attention to this tradition, and they used lime that had been kept in a slaked condition, but still caustic—that is, still deprived of most of its carbonic acid, for twelve years! For mixing the plaster the proportions of lime to sand or marble dust vary; Cennino gives two of sand to one of “rich” or caustic lime, but the Germans used three of sand to one of lime. Whatever its exact constitution, the intonaco has to be carefully laid each morning over that part of the rough cast, previously well wetted, that corresponds to the amount laid out for the day’s work. Contrary to the prescription of Vitruvius and Pompeian practice, which favours a polished surface, the moderns prefer a slight roughness or “tooth” on the intonaco. Painting should not begin, so Cornelius advised (First Report, p. 24), till “the surface is in such a state that it will barely receive the impression of the finger, but not so wet as to be in danger of being stirred up by the brush.”
The pigments are ready mixed in little pots, on a tin palette with a rim round the edge, or on a table, and in old Italian practice each colour was compounded in three shades—dark, middle and light. The water should be boiled or distilled, or should be rainwater; for spring-water often contains carbonate of lime that would derange the chemistry of the process. Again, on account of the chemical action that takes place during the process, the pigments have to be carefully selected. The palette of the fresco painter is indeed a very restricted one, and this is another reason of the broad and simple effect of the work. Practically speaking only the earth colours, such as the ochres raw or burned, can be used with safety; even the white has to be pure white lime (in Italian, bianco San-Giovanni), since lead white used in oil painting (Italian, biacca) is inadmissible. Vegetable and animal pigments are as a rule excluded, “very few colours of organic origin withstanding the decomposing action of lime” (Church, p. 280). The brushes are of hog-bristles or otter-hair or sable, and have to be rather long in the hair. Round ones are recommended. According to early Italian practice, the painter would first outline the figures or objects, already drawn on the plaster, with a long-haired brush dipped in red ochre, and would then, e.g. in the case of the faces, lay in broadly with terre verte the shadows under the brows, below the nostrils, and round the chin, and bring down and fuse into these shadows the darkest of the three flesh-tints, with a dexterous blending of the wet pigments upon a surface that preserves their dampness. On the other side these half-tones are now modelled up into the lighter hues of the flesh. White may then be used in decided touches for the high lights, and the details of the eyes, mouth and other features put in without too much searching after accidents of local colour. Modern frescoists have found that “the tints first applied sink in and look faint, so that it is necessary sometimes to go over the surface repeatedly with the same colour before the full effect is gained” (First Report, p. 24), but it is well to allow in each case some minutes to elapse before touching any spot a second time. For the hair the Italians would make three tints suffice, the high lights again following with white. The draperies are broadly treated. After the whole has been laid in, in monochrome, with the green pigment, the folds would be marked out with the deepest of the three tints for shadow, and these shadows united by the middle tint. Lastly the lighter parts are painted up and finally reinforced with white. The work needs to be deftly touched, for too much handling of one spot may destroy the freshness of the tints and even rub up the ground. It is not necessary (as moderns have sometimes supposed) to put touch beside touch, never going twice over the same ground. So long as the pigments and the surface are wet the tints may be laid one over the other or fused at will, and may be “loaded” in some parts and in others thinly spread, the one essential being that a fresh and crisp effect shall not be lost. The wetness of the ground will always secure a certain softness in all touches, even those that give the strong high-lights, and so important is it that the plaster should not begin to dry, that it should be sprinkled if necessary with fresh water. The characteristic softness of the touches laid on “a fresco” is the more apparent when they are compared with those strokes of reinforcement which may be put on “a tempera” after the work is dry. Armenini says that the shadows may be finished and deepened by hatching, as in a drawing, with black and lake laid on with a soft brush with a medium of gum, size, or white and yolk of egg diluted with vinegar. Such retouches are always hard and “wiry,” and are as much as possible to be avoided.
As examples of execution in fresco no works are better than those of Luini. He painted rapidly and thinly, securing thereby a transparency of effect that did not however preclude richness. Heath Wilson indeed says of his painting that “it may be ​ compared to that of Rubens; it is juicy, transparent, and clear; . . . his execution is light and graceful.” No sounder model could be taken for modern work. The high-water mark of achievement in fresco painting was however reached by a greater than Luini—by Michelangelo in his painting of the Sistine Chapel roof. Considering that since his boyhood he had had no practical experience of the fresco process, and refused the commission as long as he could because he was not a painter but a sculptor, Buonarroti’s technical success in the manipulation of the difficult process is still more astounding than the aesthetic result of the work as a creation of imaginative genius. He had to paint for the most part lying on his back in a sort of cradle, and working with his arms above his head, and had no skilled assistants; yet there is no quality in the work that strikes us more than its freshness and air of easy mastery, as if the artist were playing with his task. The fusion of the lights and shadows through the most delicate half-tones is accomplished in that melting fashion for which the Italians used the term sfumato or “misty,” while at the same time the touches are crisp and firm, the accent here and there decided; and the artist’s incomparable mastery of form gives a massive solidity to the whole (see fig. 34, Plate X.)
In our own times and in English-speaking circles the fresco process has been discredited owing to the comparative failure of the experiments connected with the Houses of Parliament. On the condition of the frescoes there, as well as on that of the pictures in various other media, a series of Memoranda were made by Professor Church, and a select committee of the House of Lords took evidence on the subject as late as December 1906. Most of the frescoes executed in the forties and fifties of the 19th century had got into a deplorable state; but Church’s belief was that the main cause of the decay was the sulphurous acid with which, owing to the consumption of coal and gas, the air of London is so highly charged. The action of this acid—a million tons of which are said to be belched out into the London atmosphere in every year—turns the carbonate of lime which forms the surface of the fresco into a sulphate, and it ceases to retain its binding power over the pigments. “The chemical change,” he reports, “is accompanied by a mechanical expansion which causes a disruption of the ground and is the main cause of the destruction of the painting.” It is a remarkable fact, however, that one of the frescoes in question. Sir John Tenniel’s “St Cecilia,” completed in 1850, painted very thinly and on a smooth surface, lasted well, and opposed “a considerable measure of successful resistance for nearly half a century on the part of a pure fresco to the hostile influence of the London atmosphere” (Church, Memorandum, iv. 1896).
Abroad, experience was more favourable. The earliest frescoes of the modern revival—those by Cornelius and his associates from the Casa Bartholdy at Rome—are in a fairly good state in the National Gallery at Berlin. Such too is the condition of Cornelius’s large fresco in the Ludwigskirche at Munich. The best modern frescoes, from the artistic point of view, in all Europe are those of about 1850 by Alfred Rethel in the town-hall at Aix-la-Chapelle, and they are well preserved. The exterior frescoes on the Pinacotek at Munich have on the other hand mostly perished; but the climate of that city is severe in winter, and nothing else was really to be expected. We must not expect carbonate of lime to resist atmospheric influences which affect to a greater or less degree all mineral substances.
§ 36. Fresco-Secco.—(See Charles Heath Wilson, in appendix to Second Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts, London, 1843, p. 40; Church, Chemistry of Paints and Painting, 1901, p. 278).
The process called “fresco-secco” is a method of lime painting on a plaster surface that has been allowed to dry. It is described by Theophilus in the Schedula of about A.D. 1100; and Mr Charles Heath Wilson in 1843 wrote of it as “extensively used in Italy at present and with great success.” It is of course obvious that paintings must often be executed on walls the plastering of which is already dry, and on which the true fresco process is impracticable. Some kind of painting in tempera is thus needful, and “fresco-secco” uses for this the lime that is the very constituent of the plaster. The process is thoroughly to drench the dry surface of the plaster the night before with water with which a little lime or baryta water has been mixed, and to renew the wetting the next morning. The artist then fixes up his cartoon, pounces the outlines, and sets to work to paint with the same pigments as used in buon fresco mixed with lime or baryta water or with a little slaked lime. If the wall become too dry a syringe is used to wet it. The directions given by Theophilus (i. 15) correspond with this modern practice. “When figures or representations of other things,” he says, “are to be delineated on a dry wall, it must be forthwith moistened with water till it is thoroughly wet. On this wet ground all the colours must be laid that are required, and they must be all mixed with lime, and will dry with the wall so that they adhere to it.” Mr C. H. Wilson praises the work for its convenience, economy, and ease of execution, and notes that “for ornament it is a better method than real fresco, as in the latter art it is quite impossible to make the joinings at outlines owing to the complicated forms of ornaments,” but says that “it is in every important respect an inferior art to real fresco. Paintings executed in this mode are ever heavy and opaque, whereas fresco is light and transparent.” He declares also for its durability, but Professor Church states what seems obvious, that “the fixation of the pigments . . . is less complete” than in real fresco though depending on the same chemical conditions (Second Report, 1843, p. 40; Chemistry, p. 279).
§ 37. Stereochromy or Water-Glass Painting.—(See Chemischtechnische Bibliothek, Band lxxviii., Die Mineral-Malerei, von A. Keim, Wien, &c., 1881; Rev. J. A. Rivington in Journal of the Society of Arts, No. 1630, Feb. 15, 1884; Mrs Lea Merritt and Professor Roberts Austin in Journal of the Society of Arts, No. 2246, Dec. 6, 1895; F. G. Cremer, Beiträge zur Technik der Monumental-Malverfahren, Düsseldorf, 1895).
Akin to “fresco-secco,” in that a mineral agent is used to secure the adhesion of the colouring matter to the plaster, is the process known as stereochromy or water-glass painting. It is not a traditional process, but an outcome of comparatively modern chemical research, and is not yet a century old. It is based on the properties of the substance called water-glass, a silicate of potassium or of soda, perfected by the German chemist Von Fuchs about 1825. A process of painting called “stereochromy” was soon after evolved, in which pigments of the same kind as those used in fresco, mixed only with distilled water and laid on a prepared plaster ground, were afterwards fixed and securely locked up by being drenched with this substance, which is equivalent to a soluble glass. Some of the mural paintings in the Houses of Parliament, notably those by Maclise, were executed in this process. Improvements were more recently effected in the process with which the names of Keim and Recknagel of Munich are connected, and in this form it has been used a good deal in Germany in the last quarter of the 19th century both in interiors and in the open air. For example, in 1881 Professor Schraudolph of Munich painted in this process the front of the Hôtel Bellevue in that city. This improved water-glass painting was introduced to notice in England in a paper read before the Society of Arts by the Rev. J. A. Rivington on the 13th of February 1884, and printed in the Journal of the society, No. 1630. A more recent description is contained in F. G. Cremer’s Beiträge.
The recipe for the preparation of the actual medium is as follows: 15 parts pounded quartz-sand, 10 parts refined potash, 1 part powdered charcoal are mixed together and fused for 6 to 8 hours in a glass furnace. The resultant mass when cold is reduced to powder and boiled for 3 or 4 hours in an iron vessel with distilled water till it dissolves and yields a heavy syrupy liquor of strongly alkaline reaction. This can be diluted with water, and in the process is applied hot.
The ground is very carefully prepared, and over a thoroughly sound and dry backing a thin coat of plaster is laid, composed of only 1 part lime to 5 or 8 parts selected sand and pounded marble with a slight admixture of infusorial earth. The object is to obtain a homogeneous porous ground that can be thoroughly permeated with the solution, and to help to secure this the intonaco when dry ​ is sprayed with hydrofluo-silicic acid to dissolve away the crystalline skin of carbonate of lime formed on the surface and to “open the pores” of the plaster. The surface of the painting ground, which is left with a decided “tooth” upon it, is then well soaked with the solution, and when dry will be found “hard but perfectly absorbent and ready for painting.”
The pigments consist in the usual ochres and earths; chrome reds, greens, and yellows; Naples yellow (antimoniate of lead); cobalt blue and green; and artificial ultramarine; terre verte, &c., with zinc white or baryta white.
It is important however to note, that the pigments (which can be supplied by Messrs Schirmer, late Faulstich, of Munich, and many other firms) are mixed with various substances so as to render uniform the action upon them of the fixing solution and neutralize the action of its alkalies. The operations of painting, in which only distilled water is used with the colours, are easy and admit of considerable freedom. “Every variety of treatment is possible, and the method adapts itself to any individual style of painting.” The work can be left and resumed at will. After the painting is dry there comes the all-important final process of fixing with the water-glass solution. This is sprayed on in a hot state by means of a special apparatus, and the process is repeated till the wall can absorb no more, the idea being that the substance will penetrate right through to the wall, and when set will bind pigments, intonaco, rough plastering and wall into one hard mass of silicate that will be impervious to moisture or any injurious agencies. The last paragraph of the official account of the Keim process issued in 1883 for the guidance of those contemplating mural work runs as follows: “The fixing of the picture is accomplished by means of a hot solution of potash water-glass, thrown against the surface by means of a spray-producing machine in the form of a very fine spray. This fixing done, by several repetitions of the process, a solution of carbonate of ammonia is finally applied to the surface. The carbonate of potash, which is thus quickly formed, is removed by repeated washings with distilled water. Then the picture is dried by a moderate artificial heat. Finally a solution of paraffin in benzene may be used to enrich the colours and further preserve the painting from adverse influences.”
§ 38. Spirit Fresco or the “Gambier Parry” Process, with modifications by Professor Church.—(See Spirit Fresco Painting: an Account of the Process, by T. Gambier Parry, London, 1883; Church, Chemistry of Paints and Painting, 288 seq.).
This process is also one of quite modern origin, but in Great Britain, at any rate, it is now very popular. Mr Gambier Parry, who invented and first put it into practice, claims for it that it “is not the mere addition of one or more medium to the many already known, but a system, complete from the first preparation of a wall to the last touch of the artist,” and that the advantages it offers are “(1) durability (the principal materials being all but imperishable); (2) power to resist external damp and changes of temperature; (3) luminous effect; (4) a dead surface; (5) freedom from all chemical action on colours.”
The theory of the process is much the same as that of stereochromy, the drenching of the ground with a solution that forms at the same time the medium of the pigments, so that the whole forms when dry a homogeneous mass. The solution or medium is however not a mineral one, but a combination of oils, varnishes and wax, the use of which makes the process nearly akin to that of oil painting. The objection to the use of oil painting proper on walls is the shininess of effect characteristic of that system, which is in mural work especially to be avoided, and “spirit fresco” aims at the elimination of the oleaginous element and the substitution of wax which gives the “matt” surface desired.
Mr Gambier Parry directs a carefully laid intonaco of ordinary plaster suitable for fresco on a dry backing, “the one primary necessity” being that the intonaco “should be left with its natural surface, its porous quality being absolutely essential. All smoothing process or ‘floating’ with plaster of Paris destroys this quality. All cements must be avoided.” When dry the surface of the wall must be well saturated with the medium, for which the following is the recipe: pure white wax 4 oz. by weight; elemi resin 2 oz. by weight dissolved in 2 oz. of rectified turpentine; oil of spike lavender 8 oz. by measure; copal varnish about 20 oz. by measure. These ingredients are melted and boiled together by a process described in his paper, and when used for the wall the medium is diluted in one and a half its bulk of good turpentine. With this diluted solution the wall is well soaked, and the directions continue, “after a few days left for evaporation, mix equal quantities of pure white lead in powder and of gilder’s whitening in the medium slightly diluted with about a third of turpentine, and paint the surface thickly, and when sufficiently evaporated to bear a second coat, add it as thickly as a brush can lay it. This when dry, for which two or three weeks may be required, produces a perfect surface” both white and absorbent.
The pigments, which are practically the same as those used in oil painting, must be ground in dry powder in the undiluted medium, and when prepared can be kept in tubes like oil colours. Solid painting with a good deal of body is recommended and pure oil of spike is freely used as painting medium. Pure spike oil may also be washed over the ground before painting “to melt the surface (hence the name Spirit Fresco) and prepare it to incorporate the colours painted into it.” The spike oil is “the one common solvent of all the materials; . . . the moment the painter’s brush touches the surface (already softened, if necessary, for the day’s work) it opens to receive the colours, and on the rapid evaporation of the spike oil it closes them in, and thus the work is done.” The oil of spike lavender, it may be noticed, is an essential oil prepared from Lavandula spica.
Professor Church has suggested improvement in the composition of the medium by eliminating the “doubtful constituents” elemi resin and bees’-wax and substituting paraffin wax, one of the safest of materials, dissolved in non-resinifiable oil of turpentine. This is mixed as before with copal varnish and used in the same way and with the same or better results as Mr Gambier Parry’s medium.
§ 39. Oil Processes of Wall Painting.—The use of the oil medium for painting on plaster in medieval days opens up a much debated subject on which a word will be said in connexion with oil painting in general. In the later Renaissance period in Italy it came into limited use, and Leonardo essayed it in an imperfect form and with disastrous result in his “Last Supper” at Milan. Other artists, notably Sebastiano del Piombo, were more successful, and Vasari, who experimented in the technique, gives his readers recipes for the preparation of the plaster ground. This with Cennino (ch. 90) had consisted in a coat of size or diluted egg-tempera mixed with milk of fig-shoots, but later on there was substituted for this several coats of hot boiled linseed oil. This was still in common use in the 16th century, but Vasari himself had evolved a better recipe which he gives us in the 8th chapter of his “Introduction” to Painting. Over undercoatings of ordinary plaster he lays a stucco composed of equal parts of lime, pounded brick, and scales of iron mixed with white of egg and linseed oil. This is then grounded with white oil toned down with a mixture of red and yellow easily drying pigments, and on this the painting is executed.
In Edinburgh and other places Mrs Traquair has recently carried out wall paintings on dry plaster with oil colours much thinned with turpentine. The ground is prepared with several coats of white oil paint, and the finished work is finally varnished with the best copal carriage varnish.
In most cases oil painting intended for mural decoration has been executed on canvas, to be afterwards attached to the wall. This is the case more especially in France, and also in America at the Boston public library and other places. The effort here is to get rid of the shiny effect of oil painting proper by eliminating as far as practicable the oil. As this however serves as the binding material of the pigments the procedure is a risky one. To suppress the oil and to secure a “matt” surface Mr E. A. Abbey employed at Boston and elsewhere, as a medium for painting with ordinary oil colours, wax dissolved in spike oil and turpentine. In France Puvis de Chavannes used some preparation to secure a matt effect in his fine decorative oil painting on canvas.
§ 40. Tempera Painting on Walls.—This is a very ancient and widely diffused technique, but the processes of it do not differ in principle from those of panel painting in the same method. It is accordingly dealt with under tempera painting in general (§ 43).
§ 41. Encaustic Painting on Walls.—(See Schultze-Naumburg, Die Technik der Malerei, p. 122 seq.; Paillot de Montabert, Traité complet de la peinture, vol. ix.).
It has been already mentioned that wax is employed in modern mural painting in order to secure a matt surface. Many pictures have been carried out within the last century on walls in a regular wax medium that may or may not represent an ancient process. Hippolyte Flandrin executed his series of mural pictures in St Vincent de Paul and St Germain des Prés in Paris in a process worked out by Paillot de Montabert. Wax dissolved in turpentine or oil of spike is the main constituent of the medium with which the wall is saturated and the colours ground. Heat is used to drive the wax into the plaster.
A German recipe prepared by Andreas Müller in Düsseldorf has been used for mural paintings in the National Gallery, Berlin. ​ In this one part virgin wax is dissolved in two parts turpentine with a few drops of boiled linseed oil. The pigments are ground in boiled linseed oil with the addition of this medium. The plaster ground, well dried, is soaked with hot boiled linseed oil diluted with an equal quantity of turpentine. It is then grounded with several coats of oil paint for a priming and smoothed with pumice stone. The painting can be executed in a thin water colour technique or with a full body, and dries lighter than when wet and with a dead surface.
§ 42. Encaustic Painting in general in Ancient and Modern Times.—(See Cros and Henry, L’Encaustique et les autres procédés de la peinture chez les anciens, Paris, 1884; Flinders-Petrie, Hawara, &c., London, 1889; O. Donner v. Richter, Über Technisches in der Malerei der Alten, Munich, 1885; Berger, Beiträge zur Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Maltechnik, ii. 185 seq.; Munich, 1904).
Although in modern mural painting wax is employed to secure a matt surface, in ancient times it appears to have been valued rather from the depth and intensity it lent to colours when it was polished. It there represented an attempt to secure the same force and pictorial quality which in modern times are gained by the use of the oil medium. We are told of it by the ancients that it was a slow and troublesome process, and the name of it, meaning “burning in,” shows that the inconvenience of a heating apparatus was inseparable from it; yet it seems at the same time to have been a generally accepted technique, and Greek writers from Anacreon to Procopius treat “wax” as the standard material for the painter. Nay more, hardly a day now passes without every one of us bearing testimony in the words he uses to the importance of the technique in antiquity. The Etymologicum magnum of the 12th century makes the process stand for painting generally (ἐγκεκαυμένη-ἐξωγραφημένη), and the name “encaustic” came to be applied not only to painting but also to sumptuous calligraphy. Then it was applied to writing in general, and the name still survives in the Italian inchiostro and our own familiar “ink” (Eastlake, Materials, i. 151).
The technique of ancient encaustic has given rise to much discussion which till recently was carried on chiefly on a literary basis. Fresh material has been contributed by the discovery, in the eighties of the 19th century, in Egypt of a series of portraits on mummy cases, executed for the most part in a wax process, and dating probably from the first two or three centuries A.D. Previous to this discovery there was little material of a monumental kind, though what appears to be the painting apparatus of a Gallo-Roman artist in encaustic was found in 1847 at St Médard-des-Prés in La Vendée, and has been often figured. It should be stated at the outset that the modern process of dissolving wax in turpentine or an essential oil like oil of spike was not known to the ancients, who however knew how to mix resinous substances with it, as in the case of ship-painting (Pliny xi. 16; Dioscorides i. 98). They also saponified wax by boiling it with potash so as to form what was called “Punic wax” (Pliny xxi. 84 seq.), and this emulsion may be reduced with water, and at the same time combines with oil and with size, gum, egg and other temperas. Wax, Pliny says, may be coloured and used for painting—ad edendas similitudines (loc. cit.); but as the name “encaustic” implies, and as we gather from another of Pliny’s phrases, ceris pingere ac picturam inurere (xxxv. 122), heat was an essential part of the process. Hence the material must have been employed as a rule in a more or less solid form and liquefied each time for use, and not in the form of a diluted solution or emulsion which could be made serviceable cold. It is true that Punic wax mixed with a little oil is prescribed by Vitruvius (vii. 9, 3) as a solution for covering and locking up from the air a coat of the changeable pigment vermilion laid on a wall (see § 35), but the solution is used hot and driven in by application of a heating apparatus.
* (From a photograph by W. A. Mansell & Co.)
* Fig. 35.—Mummy of Artemi­dorus with painted portrait, inscribed “O Artemidorus, Farewell.” About A.D. 200 (Brit. Mus.).
The accounts of the technique furnished to us by Pliny can be brought into connexion with the actual remains, and Berger and others have succeeded fairly well in imitating these by processes evolved from the ancient notices. It is unfortunate that the most important passage of Pliny (xxxv. 149) appears corrupt. It runs in the received text as follows: Encausto pingendi duo fuere antiquitus genera, cera et in ebore cestro, id est vericulo, donec classes pingi coepere. Hoc tertium accessit resolutis igni ceris penicillo utendi, quae pictura navibus nec sole nec sale ventisve corrumpitur. Here three kinds of encaustic painting are mentioned, two old and one new (the comparative chronology of the processes need not come into question), and in the two last cases the distinction is that between two instruments of painting, the cestrum and the penicillus or brush. It is natural to suggest that instead of the word cera, which, as wax is the material common to all encaustic processes, need not have been introduced and on manuscript authority may be suspected, some word for a third instrument of painting should be restored. Berger, with some philological likelihood, conjectures the word cauterio, which means properly a “branding-iron,” but which he believes to be a sort of hollowed spatula or spoon with a large and a small end by which melted waxes of different colours might be taken up, laid on a ground, such as a wooden panel, and manipulated in a soft state as pictorial effect required. Instruments of the kind were found in the Gallo-Roman tomb in La Vendée. The second kind of painting with the cestrum or vericulum was on ivory and must have been on a minute scale. The “cestrum” was certainly a tool of corresponding size, and some have seen in it a sort of point or graver, such as that with which the incised outlines were made on the figured ivory plaques in the Kertch room at St Petersburg (see below); others a small lancet-shaped spatula Like the tools that sculptors employ for working on plaster. The brush, with which melted waxes could be laid on in washes, as was the case on ships, needs no explanation.
An examination of the portraits from the mummy cases (see fig. 35) makes it quite clear that the brush was used with coloured melted waxes to paint in, in sketchy fashion, the draperies and possibly to underpaint the flesh and hair, while the flesh was executed in a more pastos style, with waxes in a soft condition laid on and manipulated with some spatula-like instrument, which we may if we like call “cauterium” or “cestrum.” The marks of such tool are on several of the heads unmistakably in evidence, and may be seen in specimens in the London National Gallery. There is a difference of opinion however as to the constitution of the wax. Donner von Richter holds that the wax was “Punic,” i.e. a kind of emulsion, and was blended with oil and resinous balsams so as to be transformed into a soft paste which could be manipulated cold with the spatula. Heat for “burning in” (picturam inurere) he thinks was afterwards applied, with the effect of slightly fusing and blending the coloured waxes that had been in this way worked into a picture. Berger, on the other hand, believes that the coloured wax pastes were manipulated hot with the “cauterium,” which would be maintained in a heated condition, and that there was no subsequent process of “burning in.” Flinders Petrie is of opinion that, even in the ​ case of the washes laid on with the brush, pure melted wax was employed and not a compound or emulsion, such as is generally assumed. Berger believes in a mixture of wax, oil and resin.
It is interesting to note that the distinguished modern painter, Arnold Böcklin, executed his picture of “Sappho” in coloured pastes composed of copal resin, turpentine and wax, manipulated with a curved spatula, and that he applied heat to fuse slightly the impasto. He believed he obtained in this way a brilliancy not to be compassed with oils.
The nature of the “cestron” technique on ivory is not known. The only existing artistic designs in ivory are executed by engraved lines, and these are sometimes filled in with coloured pastes. Exquisite work in this style exists in the Hermitage at St Petersburg, and there are examples in other museums, but this can hardly be termed encaustic painting. A better idea of the laboriously executed miniature portraits of which Pliny tells us can be gained from the small medallion portraits modelled in coloured wax that were common at the Renaissance period and are still executed to-day. In these however the smaller details are put in with the brush and pigment.
It is known from the evidence of the Erechtheum inscription that the encaustic process was employed for the painting of ornamental patterns on architectural features of marble buildings, but there is still considerable doubt as to the technique employed in such forms of decorative painting as the colouring of the white plaster that covered the surfaces of stonework on monumental buildings in inferior materials. Polychrome ornament on terracotta for architectural embellishment may have been fixed by the glaze as in ordinary vase painting, but Pliny says that Agrippa figulinum opus encausto pinxit in his Thermae (xxxvi. 189). The technique of the polychrome lecuthi and of the polychrome terra-cotta statuary is not certain.
The later history of wax painting after the fall of the Western Empire is of interest in connexion with the evolution of the painter’s technique as a whole. Its possible relation to oil painting will be noticed later on. Here it is enough to note that the so-called Lucca MS. of the 8th century mentions the mingling of wax with colours, and the Byzantine Mount Athos Handbook, recording probably the practice of the 11th century, gives a recipe for an emulsion of partly saponified wax with size as a painting medium. A recipe of the 15th century quoted by Mrs Merrifield from the MSS. of Le Begue gives a similar composition that can be thinned with water and used to temper all sorts of colours.
§ 43. Tempera Painting. [Cennino’s Trattato, in the English edition with terminal essays by Mrs Herringham (London, 1899), is the best work to consult on the subject. The Society of Painters in Tempera published in 1907 a volume of Papers on the subject. F. Lloyd’s Practical Guide to Scene Painting and Painting in Distemper (London, 1879), is chiefly about the painting of theatrical scenery, and this subject is also dealt with in articles by William Telbin in the Magazine of Art (1889), pp. 92, 195.]
The binding substances used in the tempera processes may be classed as follows: (1) Size, preferably that made from boiling down cuttings of parchment. Fish-glue, gum, especially gum tragacanth and gum arabic (the Senegal gum of commerce); glycerin, honey, milk, wine, beer, &c. (2) Eggs, in the form of (i) the yolk alone, (ii) the white alone, (iii) the whole contents of the egg beaten up, (iv) the same with the addition of the milk or sap of young shoots of the fig-tree, (v) the contents of the egg with the addition of about the same quantity of vinegar [(iv) was used in the south, (v) north of the Alps]. (3) Emulsions, in which wax or oil is mingled with substances which bring about the possibility of diluting the mixture with water. Thus oil can be made to unite mechanically (not chemically) with water by the interposition either of gum or of the yolk of egg.
Of these materials it may be noted that a size or gum tempera is always soluble in water, and is moreover always of a rather thin consistency. The latter applies also to white of egg. On the other hand the yolk of an egg makes a medium of greater body, and modern artists, especially in Germany, have painted in it with a full impasto. The yolk of egg or the whole egg slightly beaten up may be used to temper powdered pigments without any dilution by means of water, and the stillest body can in this way be obtained. The medieval artists seem however always to have painted with egg thinly, diluting the yolk with about an equal quantity of water. Their panels show this, and we can argue the same from the number of successive coats of paint prescribed by Cennino and other writers. The former (ch. 165) mentions seven or eight or ten coats of colours tempered with yolk alone, that must have been well thinned with water. This point will be returned to later on. The yolk of egg is really itself an emulsion as it contains about 30% of oil or fatty matter, though in its fluid state it combines readily with water. “Egg yolk,” writes Professor Church (Chemistry, p. 74), “must be regarded as essentially an oil medium. As it dries the oil hardens,” and ultimately becomes a substance not unlike leather that is quite impervious to moisture. Hence while size tempera when dry yields to water egg tempera will resist it. Sir William Richmond gave a proof of this in evidence before a committee of the House of Lords in November 1906, describing how he had exposed a piece of plaster painted with yolk of egg medium to all weathers for six months on the roof of a church and found it at the end perfectly intact. As to the milk of young fig-shoots, it is interesting to know from Principal Laurie (“Pigments and Vehicles of the Old Masters,” in Journal of the Society of Arts, Jan. 15, 1892, p. 172) that “fig-tree belongs to the same family as the india-rubber tree, and its juice contains caoutchouc.” He says, “doubtless the mixture of albumen and caoutchouc would make a very tough and protective medium.”
With regard to the historical use of these different media, the medieval Italians used almost exclusively the yolk of egg medium, and this is also the favourite tempera of the moderns. In fact in Italy the word “tempera,” as used by Vasari and other writers, generally means the egg medium. On the other hand size or gum was more common north of the Alps. It is in most cases very difficult to decide what temperas were in vogue in different regions and at the various epochs of the art, and the following must not be taken for more than an approximate statement of the facts. As far as it is known, the binding material in ancient Egypt was for the most part size, while Greek influence from about 600 B.C. onwards may have led to the use of wax emulsion (Punic wax). For paintings on mummy cases, and on papyrus scrolls, the medium may have been size or gum. Professor Flinders Petrie says it was acacia gum. The wall paintings of ancient Mesopotamia as well as those of India and the farther East generally were all in tempera, and it is noteworthy that recipes and technical practices of the East and of the West seem to be curiously alike. The exact media used are doubtful. The same doubt exists with regard to the exact processes of wall and panel painting in tempera in ancient Greece and Italy, in the East, in Byzantine times, and in the early middle ages both north and south of the Alps. The materials and processes mentioned by Pliny or in the various technical handbooks are on the whole clearly established, but it is very difficult to say in particular cases what was the actual technique employed. Any certainty in this matter must be based on the results not only of superficial examination but of analysis, and the very small quantities of the materials that can be placed at the disposal of the chemist make it often impossible to arrive at a satisfactory diagnosis.
A story in Pliny (xxxv. 102) shows that the Greek panel painters, when not “encaustae,” used a water tempera, but whether size or egg was its main constituent we do not know. Apelles is said to have covered his finished panels with a thin coat of what Pliny calls “atramentum,” which may have been a white of egg varnish, for spirit varnishes were not known in antiquity (Berger i. and ii. 183), and the Greeks do not seem to have used drying oils nor varnishes made with these. Byzantine panel painting, according to the Mount Athos Handbook, was executed as a rule in an egg tempera (Berger iii. 75), and this technique was followed later on in Italy. For Greek and Etruscan (Italian) wall-paintings of the pagan period; for late Roman wall-paintings north of the Alps, and for Romanesque and Gothic wall-paintings, ​ we have to choose amongst the theories of size or egg tempera, wax tempera (emulsion), and the lime painting in “fresco secco” described by Theophilus. When we come to the panel painting from the 12th to the 15th century we are on surer ground. For the north we have the technical directions of Theophilus, for the south those of Cennino. Theophilus (i. ch. xxvii.) prescribes a tempera of gum from the cherry tree, and, with some pigments, white of egg. The finished panel was to be covered with an oil varnish (vernition). Cennino prescribes a tempera of the yolk of egg alone, half and half with the pigments, which have been finely ground in water and are very liquid, so that there might be in the ultimate compound about as much water as egg. A tempera of the whole egg with the milk of fig-shoots he recommends, not for panels, but for retouching fresco-work on the wall when it is dry. Tempera panels painted with egg yolk are, like the gum tempera panels of Theophilus, to be varnished with vernice liquida (oil varnish). In these media were executed all the fine tempera panels of the early Italian and early German schools of the 15th century, and these represent a limited, but within its bounds a very perfect and interesting, form of the painter’s art.
A word or two may be said here about the various subsidiary processes connected with 14th and 15th century panel painting, which are of great interest as showing the conscientious, and indeed devotional spirit in which the operations were carried out. At the outset of his Traitato Cennino gives a list of the processes the panel painter has to go through, and in subsequent chapters he describes minutely each of these. The artist must “know how to grind colours, to use glue, to fasten the linen on the panel, to prime with gesso, to scrape and smooth the gesso, to make reliefs in gesso, to put on bole, to gild, to burnish, to mix temperas, to lay on grounding colours, to transfer by pouncing through pricked lines, to sharpen lines with the stylus, to indent with little patterns, to carve, to colour, to ornament the panel, and finally to varnish it.” The preliminary operations, before the artificer actually begins to “colour” or paint, will take him six years to learn, and it requires with Cennino half a hundred chapters to describe them. The wooden panel is carefully compacted and linen is glued down over its face, and over this is laid, in many successive coats, a gesso ground of slaked plaster of Paris mixed with size, with which composition raised ornaments, such as the nimbi of saints, &c., can be modelled. Both these and the flat parts of the panel are scraped and smoothed till they are like ivory. The design of the picture is then drawn out on the panel, and the outlines sharpened up with the utmost precision. The gilding of the background and of the carved woodwork in which the panel is set now follows. Armenian bole, ground finely with white of egg diluted with water, is spread over the gesso and carefully burnished as a ground for water gilding with white of egg. The gold is then burnished till it appears almost dark (in the shadow) from its own refulgence. The delicate indented patterns which are so charming on the gilded grounds of the painted panels on East Anglian screens, such as that at Southwold, are stamped with little punches, and Cennino says this is one of the most beautiful parts of the art. In the actual painting, which is on the non-gilded part of the panel, the utmost attention is paid to the ornamentation of brocaded draperies, in which gold is used as a ground and is made to show in parts, while glazes of pigment mixed with drying oil are also used. Directions for painting the flesh, which is to be done after the draperies and background, are precise. There is an under-painting in a monochrome of terra verte and white, and over this in successive coats of great thinness the flesh-tints are spread, every tint being laid in its right position on the face, the darkest flesh-tint being shaded down to the terra verte and softened off in a tender sfumato manner. Many coats are superimposed, but the green ground is still to remain slightly visible. At the last the lightest flesh-tint is used to obtain the reliefs and the high lights are touched in in white. The outlines are sharpened up with red mixed with black. The varnishing process should be delayed for at least a year, and the varnish, which was evidently thick, is to be spread by the fingers over the painted surfaces, care being taken not to let the varnish go over the gold ground. This should be done if possible in the sun, but Cennino says that if the varnish be boiled it will dry without being placed in the sun.
The process thus described is not what we should call, in the modern sense, painting, for the precision and conventionality of the work and the great importance given to subsidiary details are quite opposed to the spirit of the art since the 16th century. Nevertheless, the naïve simplicity of the design and the exquisite delicacy of the finish have an unfailing charm. We feel, as Cennino says, that the artist has loved and delighted in his work, and regarded his patient manipulation as a religious act. A modern artist in tempera specially praises the old work for its “breadth, transparency and purity of colour,” qualities “owing to the gradual bringing forward of the picture from a simple outline of extreme beauty.” “This outline is never lost; its beautifully opposed and harmonizing lines and masses are retained to the end, even strengthened and accentuated, giving great distinctness at a distance, even when not actually visible. A perfectly modulated monochrome of light and shade fills the outline, apparent through the overlaid glory of colour, over which again is thrown a veil of atmosphere, a refulgence of light, a suggestion of palpitating space” (Mrs Herringham’s Cennino, p. 218). A difficulty in the technique is the rapid drying of the medium, that prevents the fusing of the colours together in the impasto, which is possible in oil painting. Woltmann (History of Painting, Eng. trans. i. 406) thought that in the north honey was mixed with the white of egg or size to prevent too rapid drying, and he wrote, “this method rendered possible a liquid and softly gradated handling, and though the Italian variety of tempera allowed greater depth in the shadows, the northern gave on the whole greater brightness.” In Italy, owing to the rapid drying of the egg-yolk, modelling was often secured by hatching, which is not so pleasing in its effect as the other method of superimposing thin coats of paint one over the other till the proper effect of shading is secured. One notable quality of tempera is its transparency, which is referred to by Cennino when he says that the original under-painting of terra verte is never to be wholly obliterated.
The well-known group of the “Three Graces,” from Botticelli’s large panel of the “Allegory of Spring,” at Florence, gives the quality of tempera painting very aptly (see fig. 36, Plate X.). There is a Society of Painters in Tempera in London, and some artists are enthusiastic in their admiration of the process for its purity, sincerity and permanence.
Under the heading “tempera” should be noticed another style of painting with a water-medium that is executed as a rule on a large scale and in a comparatively slight fashion. Painting for the purposes of temporary decoration on canvas or wood, so much used in the Italian cities of the Renaissance period, is of this kind. Large cartoons in colour for mural pictures or tapestry, of which Raphael’s cartoons are the most famous examples, are other examples; while in modern times the technique is chiefly employed in theatrical scene painting. The pigments are tempered with size or gum, and body is given to them by whitening, pipe-clay or similar substance. Work executed in this medium dries much lighter than when it is put on, and to execute it effectively, as in the case of stage scenery, requires much skill and practice. “In the study of the art of distemper painting a source of considerable embarrassment to the inexperienced eye is that the colours when wet present such a different appearance to what they do when dry.” So writes F. Lloyds, but W. Telbin, though he recognizes this difficulty, extols the process. “A splendid material distemper! For atmosphere unequalled, and for strength as powerful as oil, in half an hour you can do with it that which in water or oil would take one or two days!” The English word “distemper” and the French “gouache” are commonly applied to this style of broad summary painting in body-colour. “Distemper” to English ears suggests house-decoration, “tempera” the work of the artist.
§ 44. Oil Painting.—(See Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting (London, 1847); Mérimée, De la peinture à l’huile (Paris, 1830); Berger, Beiträge zur Entwicklungs-Geschichte der Maltechnik, esp. iii. 221 sqq., and iv. (Munich, 1897), &c.; Dalbon, Les Origines de la peinture à l’huile (Paris, 1904); Ludwig, Über die Grundsätze der Oelmalerei (Leipzig, 1876); Lessing, Über das Alter der Oelmalerei, 1774.)
Oil painting is an art rather of the north than of the south and east, for its development was undoubtedly furthered by the demand for moisture-resisting media in comparatively damp climates, and, moreover, the drying oils on which the technique depends were but sparingly prepared in lands where olive oil, which does not dry, was a staple product.
Certain vegetable oils dry naturally in the air by a process of oxidization, and this drying or hardening is not accompanied by any considerable shrinking, nor by any change of colour; so that oil and substances mixed with it do not alter in volume nor in appearance as a consequence of the drying process. There may be a slow subsequent alteration in the direction of darkening or becoming more yellow; but this is another matter. Among these oils the most important is linseed oil extracted from the seeds of the flax plant, poppy oil from the seeds of the opium poppy, and nut oil from the kernels of the common walnut. With these oils, generally linseed, ordinary tube colours used by painters in oil are prepared, and oil varnishes, also used by artists, are made by dissolving in them certain resins. Their natural drying qualities can be greatly aided by subjecting them to heat, and ​ also by mingling with them chemical substances known as “dryers,” of which certain salts of lead and zinc are the most familiar. How far back in antiquity such oils and their properties were known is doubtful. Certain varnishes are used in Egypt on mummy cases of the New Empire and on other surfaces, and, though some of these are soluble in water, others resist it, and may be made with drying oils or essential oils, though the art of distilling these last cannot be traced back in Egypt earlier than the Roman imperial period. (See Berthelot, La Chimie au moyen âge, i. 138 (Paris, 1893). When Pliny tells us (xiv. 123) that all resins are soluble in oil, we might think he was contemplating a varnish of the modern kind. Elsewhere, however (xxiv. 34), he prescribes such a solution as a sort of emollient ointment for wounds, so it is clear that the oil he has in view is non-drying olive oil that would not make a varnish. In two passages of his Natural History (xv. 24–32, xxiii. 79–96) Pliny discourses at length on various oils, but does not refer to their drying properties. There is really no direct evidence of the use among the Greeks and Romans of drying oils and oil varnishes, though a recent writer (Cremer, Untersuchungen über den Beginn der Oelmalerei, Düss., 1899) has searched for it with desperate eagerness. The chief purpose of painting for which such materials would have been in demand is the painting of ships, but this we know was carried out in the equally waterproof medium of wax, with which resin or pitch was commingled by heat. The earliest mention of the use of a drying oil in a process connected with painting is in the medical writer Aetius. of the beginning of the 6th century A.D., who says that nut oil dries and forms a protective varnish over gilding or encaustic painting. From this time onwards the use of drying oils and varnishes in painting processes is well established. The Lucca MS. of the 8th or 9th century A.D. gives a recipe for a transparent varnish composed of linseed oil and resin. In the Mount Athos Handbook “peseri,” or boiled linseed oil, appears in common use, and with resin is made into a varnish. In the same treatise also we find a clear description of oil painting in the modern sense; but since the dates of the various portions of the Handbook are uncertain, we may refer rather to Theophilus (about A.D. 1100), who indicates the same process with equal clearness. The passages in Theophilus (i. chs. xx. and xxvi.–xxviii.) are of the first importance for the history of oil painting. He directs the artificer to take the colours he wishes to apply, to grind them carefully without water in oil of linseed prepared as he describes in ch. xx., and to paint therewith flesh and drapery, beasts or birds or foliage, just as he pleases. All kinds of pigments can be ground in the oil and used on wooden panels, for the work must be put out in the sun to dry. It is noteworthy that Theophilus (ch. xxvii.) seems to confine this method of painting to movable works (on panel, in opere ligneo, in his tantum rebus quae sole siccari possunt) that can be carried out into the sun, but in ch. xxv. of the more or less contemporary third book of Heraclius (Vienna Quellenschriften, No. iv.) oil-paint may be dried either in the sun or by artificial heat. Heraclius, moreover, knows how to mix dryers (oxide of lead) with his oil, a device with which Theophilus is not acquainted. Hence to the latter the defect of the medium was its slow drying, and Theophilus recommends as a quicker process the gum tempera already described. In any case, whether the painting be in oil or tempera, the finished panel must be varnished in the sun with “vernition” (ch. xxi.), a varnish compounded by heat of linseed oil and a gum, which is probably sandarac resin. The Mount Athos Handbook, § 53, describes practically the same technique, but indicates it as specially used for flesh, the inference being that the draperies were painted in tempera or with wax. It is worth noting that the well-known “black Madonnas,” common in Italy as well as in the lands of the Greek Church, may be thus explained. They are Byzantine icons in which the flesh has been painted in oil and the draperies in another technique. The oil has darkened with age, while the tempera parts have remained in contrast comparatively fresh. Some of them are probably the earliest oil paintings extant.
Oil painting accordingly, though in an unsatisfactory form, is established at least as early as A.D. 1100. What had been its previous history? Here it is necessary to take note of the interesting suggestion of Berger, that it was gradually evolved in the early Christian centuries from the then declining encaustic technique of classical times. We learn from Dioscorides, who dates rather later than the time of Augustus, that resin was mixed with wax for the painting of ships, and when drying oils came into use they would make with wax and resin a medium requiring less heat to make it fluid than wax alone, and one therefore more convenient for the brush-form of encaustic. Berger suspects the presence of such a medium in some of the mummy-case portraits, and points for confirmation to the chemical analysis of some pigments found in the grave of a painter at Herne St Hubert in Belgium of about the time of Constantine the Great (i. and ii. 230 seq.). One part wax with two to three parts drying (nut) oil he finds by experiment a serviceable medium. Out of this changing wax-technique he thinks there proceeded the use of drying oils and resins as media in independence of wax. If we hesitate in the meantime to regard this as more than a hypothesis, it is yet worthy of attention, for any hypothesis that suggests a plausible connexion between phenomena the origin and relations of which are so obscure deserves a friendly reception.
The Trattato of Cennino Cennini represents two or three centuries of advance on the Schedula of Theophilus, and about contemporary with it is the so-called Strassburg MS., which gives a view of German practice just as the Trattato does of Italian. This MS., attention to which was first called by Eastlake (Materials, i. 126 seq.), contains a remarkable recipe for preparing “oil for the colours.” Linseed or hempseed or old nut oil is to be boiled with certain dryers, of which white copperas (sulphate of zinc) is one. This, when bleached in the sun, “will acquire a thick consistence, and also become as transparent as a fine crystal. And this oil dries very fast, and makes all colours beautifully clear and glossy besides. All painters are not acquainted with it: from its excellence it is called oleum preciosum, since half an ounce is well worth a shilling, and with this oil all colours are to be ground and tempered,” while as a final process a few drops of varnish are to be added. The MS. probably dates rather before than after 1400.
Cennino’s treatise, written a little later, gives avowedly the recipes and processes traditional in the school of Giotto throughout the 14th century. He begins his account of oil painting with the remark that it was an art much practised by the “Germans,” thus bearing out what was said at the commencement of this section. He proceeds (chs. 90–94) to describe an oil technique for walls and for panels that sounds quite effective and modern. Linseed oil is to be bleached in the sun and mixed with liquid varnish in the proportion of an ounce of varnish to a pound of oil, and in this medium all colours are to be ground. “When you would paint a drapery with the three gradations,” Cennino proceeds, “divide the tints and place them each in its position with your brush of squirrel hair, fusing one colour with another so that the pigments are thickly laid. Then wait certain days, come again and see how the paint covers, and repaint where needful. And in this way paint flesh or anything you please, and likewise mountains, trees and anything else.” In other chapters Cennino recommends certain portions of a painting in tempera to be put in in oil, and nowhere does he give a hint that the work in oil gave any trouble through its unwillingness to dry. His medium appears, however, to have been thick, and perhaps somewhat viscous (ch. 92). This combination of oil paint and tempera on the same piece is a matter, as we shall presently see, of some significance.
In the De re aedificatoria of L. B. Alberti (written about 1450), vi. 9, there is a mention of “a new discovery of laying on colours with oil of linseed so that they resist for ever all injuries from weather and climate,” which may have some reference to so-called “German” practice.
The next Italian writer who says anything to the purpose is ​ Filarete, who wrote a long treatise on architecture and the arts of design about 1464. It is published in the Vienna Quellenschriften, neue Folge, No. III. Like Cennino, Filarete (loc. cit. p. 641) speaks of oil painting as specially practised in “Germany,” and says it is a fine art when anyone knows how to compass it. The medium is oil of linseed. “But is not this very thick?” he imagines some one objecting. “Yes, but there is a way of thinning it; I do not quite know how; but it will be stood out in a vessel and clarify itself. I understand however that there is a quicker way of managing this—but let this pass, and let us go on to the method of painting.” Filarete’s evident uncertainty about a process, which may be that of the Strassburg MS. for producing oleum preciosum, and his reference to “Germany,” inclines us to look elsewhere than to Italy for knowledge about the oil technique. As a fact the evidence of the recipe books is borne out remarkably by that of other records which show that a great deal of oil painting of one kind or another went on in northern lands from the 13th century onwards. These records are partly in the form of accounts, showing large quantities of oil and resins furnished for the use of painters engaged in extensive works of decoration; and partly in the form of contracts for executing pictures “in good oil colours.” It is true that oil might be merely employed in mordants for gilding or in varnishes, and for oil painting merely in house-decorator fashion over wood, or for colouring statues and reliefs in stone; nevertheless, with a use of proper critical methods, it has been possible for M. Dalbon and others to establish incontestably the employment in artistic wall and panel-painting of drying oils and varnishes before the 15th century, both north and, to a lesser extent, south of the Alps. These passages have been too often quoted to be cited here. (See Eastlake, Materials, p. 46 seq.; Berger, Beiträge iii. 206 seq., &c.) The earliest of the accounts, an English one, is dated 1239: “The king (Henry III.) to his treasurer and chamberlains. Pay from our treasury to Odo the goldsmith and Edward his son one hundred and seventeen shillings and tenpence for oil, sandarac resin, and colours bought, and for pictures executed in the Queen’s Chamber at Westminster.” Another, about 1275 (temp. Edward I.) runs: “To Robert King, for one cartload of charcoal for drying the painting in the King’s Chamber, IIIs VIIId.” In Flanders in 1304 there is an account (Dalbon, p. 43): “Pour 10 los d’oile acatée pour faire destrempe as couleurs,” in 1373–1374 one for “XIII libvres d’olle de linnis à faire couleurs” (p. 45). This was for the use of a certain painter Loys, who executed mural compositions of which some of the subjects are recorded. In the matter of contracts, Dalbon (p. 52) prints one of 1320 prescribing figure and landscape subjects, to be executed “en la meilleur manière que il pourront estre faites en painture,” and concluding, “et seront toutes ces choses faites à huille,” and he points convincingly to such wording as a proof that the work here under consideration must be regarded as artistic figure-painting and not mere house decoration. Lastly, just before 1400, the painter Jehan Malouel receives in 1399 oil with colours for “la peinture de plusieurs tables et tableaux d’autel,” for the Carthusian convent of Champmol near Dijon, which proves the use of oil for panel as well as for mural painting.
The further question about the survival of actual remains of work of the class just noticed is a very difficult one. There seems no reason why all this mural and panel work in oil of the 14th century should have perished, unless the medium was faulty, and, as is natural, many attempts have been made to identify extant examples as representing these early phases of the oil technique. Mural work we need not perhaps expect to find, for we know from the later experience of the Italians of the 16th century that it was difficult even then to find a safe method for oil painting on plaster. With panels preservation would be more likely, and it is always possible that some datable work of the kind may be identified that will carry the monumental history of oil painting back into the 14th century. An exhibition of early English painted panels was held in 1896 in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and some good judges believed at the time that certain 14th-century panels from St Michael at Plea, Norwich, were in oil, but this cannot be regarded as established.
If such then be the early history of oil painting, what attitude are we to adopt in face of the famous statement by Vasari that the technique was the invention of the Flemish painter Van Eyck in the year 1410? The statement was first made in the 21st chapter of Vasari’s Introduction to his Lives of the Artists (1550), and runs as follows: “Fu una bellissima inventione, ed un gran’ commodità all’ arte della pittura, il trovare il colorito a olio. Di che fu primo inventore in Fiandra Giovanni da Bruggia” (Jan van Eyck). In the life of Antonello da Messina, in the same edition, Vasari dresses up the bare fact he here relates, and gives it the personal anecdotal turn that accords with his literary methods. Here the “invention” follows on the incident of the splitting of a tempera panel varnished in oil, that according to traditional practice Van Eyck had put out in the sun to dry. This artist then turned his attention to devising some means for avoiding such mischances for the future, and, in Vasari’s words, “being not less dissatisfied with the varnish than with the process of tempera painting, he began to devise means for preparing a kind of varnish which should dry in the shade, so as to avoid having to place his pictures in the sun. Having made experiments with many things both pure and mixed together, he at last found that linseed and nut oil, among the many which he had tested, were more drying than all the rest. These, therefore, boiled with other mixtures of his, made him the varnish which he had long desired.” This varnish Vasari goes on to say he mixed with the colours and found that it “lit up the colours so powerfully that it gave a gloss of itself,” without any after-coat of varnish.
Such is the famous passage in Vasari that has probably given rise to more controversy than any similar statement in the literature of the arts. The question is, in what did the “invention” of the Van Eycks, Hubert and Jan his younger brother, consist? and the first answer that would occur to anyone knowing alike the earlier history of the oil medium and Vasari’s anecdotal predilections is the answer “There was no invention at all.” The drying properties of linseed and nut oil and the way to increase these had long been known, as had also the preparation of sandarac oil-varnish, as well as a colourless (spirit?) varnish of which there is mention in accounts prior to the 15th century (Dalbon, p. 93). The mixing of varnish with oil for a medium was also known, and indeed the oleum preciosum may be the real “invention” of which Alberti and Filarete had only vaguely heard, and of which the Van Eycks later on received the credit. The epitaphs for the tombs of the two Van Eycks make no mention of such a feat as Vasari ascribes to them, and it is quite open to anyone to take up the position that it was no improvement in technique that brought to the Van Eycks their fame in connexion with oil painting, but rather an artistic improvement that consisted in using a traditional process to execute pictures which in design, finish, beauty and glow of colour far surpassed everything previously produced in the northern schools. Pliny writes of the works of a Greek painter of about 400 B.C. that they were the first that had the power “to rivet the gaze of the spectator,” and in like manner we may say of the “Adoration of the Lamb” by the Van Eycks, the titular firstfruits of the oil painter’s technique, that it impressed the world of its time so mightily through its artistic power and beauty as to elevate to a sort of mystic importance the very method in which the paints were mixed. There is much force in this view, but at the same time it is impossible to deny to the Van Eycks the credit of technical improvements. For one thing, an artist who has an exceptional feeling for colour, texture and delicacy of finish will certainly pay special attention to his technical media; for another, the Van Eycks had a reputation long before Vasari’s time for researches into these media. In 1456, fifteen years after the death of the younger brother, Bartolommeo Facio, of Spezzia, wrote a tract De viris illustribus in which he speaks of a certain “Joannus Gallicus,” who can be identified as Jan van Eyck, as specially “learned in those arts which contributed to the making of a picture, and was on that account credited ​ with the discovery of many things in the properties of colours, which he had learned from ancient traditions recorded by Pliny and other writers.” Filarete (c. 1464) also knew of the repute of Jan van Eyck in connexion with the oil technique. Hence we may credit the Van Eycks with certain technical improvements on traditional practices and preparations in the oil technique, though these can hardly be termed “inventions,” while their artistic achievement was great enough to force into prominence whatever in the technical department they had accomplished.
Another and a more important question remains behind: What was, in fact, the practice in the matter of oil painting in vogue before the Van Eycks, altered or at any rate perfected by them and their successors, and in general use up to the time of Vasari; and how was it related to the older more widely diffused painting “a tempera”?
It is indisputable that the oil painting of the Van Eycks and the early Flemish school, together with that of the Florentines and Umbrians, and indeed of all the Italians up to Vasari’s time, save the Venetians, Correggio, and some other north Italians, does not greatly differ in artistic effect, nor, as far as can be judged, in handling, from earlier or contemporary temperas. For example, at Venice in the 15th century, Crivelli paints always in tempera, Cima in oils, but the character of their surface is almost the same, and if anything the tempera is richer in effect than the oil. The contrary is no doubt the case with the tempera “Madonna with the Violet” in the Priests’ Seminary at Cologne when compared with the somewhat later “Dombild,” also by Stephan Lochner, which is believed to be painted in oils, but the two are still in technical character very nearly akin. The fact is that tempera panels were usually coated with an oil varnish, necessarily of a somewhat warm tint, and we could hardly expect to distinguish them from oil pictures painted in or covered by varnish, unless there were a difference in the handling of the pigments. The method of handling appears however to be on the whole the same, and there are many who believe that in all essentials it is the same. Tempera panels, as we have learned from Cennino, were not only varnished but in parts might be painted in oils (ch. 143), and it is one view of the technique of the early Flemings that it was only an over-painting in oils over a preparation in tempera. Berger is of the opinion that the process was something between the two, that is to say, that it was oil tempera, the medium being an emulsion of oil and water through the intermediary of a gum. Such a medium would, as he points out (Beiträge, iii. 247 seq.), combine the thinness and limpidity in manipulation characteristic of a water tempera with the property of drying hard and impervious to moisture. This is of course only a theory. Of far more weight is the suggestion made by Principal Laurie, of Edinburgh, who has carried on for years a series of careful experiments in the various pigments and media employed in oil painting. As one result of these experiments he has found that the ordinary drying oils and oil varnishes do not, as used to be assumed, “lock up” or completely cover and protect pigments so as to prevent the access of moisture and the gases of the atmosphere, but that this function is far more effectively performed by hard pine-balsams, such as Canada balsam, dissolved in an essential oil and so made into a varnish or painting medium. In pictures by Van Eyck Principal Laurie has detected what he believes to be the use of pigments of a notoriously fugitive character, and he is convinced that the most effectual medium for preserving these in the condition in which they have come down to us would be a natural pine-balsam, with probably a small proportion of drying oil; he suggests therefore that the introduction of these ingredients may be the real secret of the Van Eyck technique. There is as yet no proof that the Van Eycks really used such a medium, though it is a preparation possible at their time, and when thinned by a process of emulsification with egg, as Dr Laurie suggests, would be a serviceable one; but they and the other early oil painters certainly used a method, and in all probability media, that did not differ greatly as regards manipulation from those in vogue in tempera.
From the aesthetic point of view therefore we have to regard early oil painting as only another form of the older tempera, expressing exactly the same artistic ideals and dominated by the same view of the relation of art to nature. To Vasari the artistic advantage of the oil medium was, first, its convenience, and, next, the depth and brilliancy it lent to the colours, which he says it “kindled,” while at the same time it lent itself to a soft fusing of tints in manipulation, so that artists could give to their figures in this technique the greatest charm and beauty combined with a force that made them seem to stand out in relief from the panel. Such a description applies very justly to work like that of the Van Eycks in the “Adoration of the Lamb,” or the later panels of Antonello da Messina, who, according to Vasari’s often-repeated story, introduced the Flemish system of oil-painting into Venice. The description does not however apply to the freer, more sweeping, more passionate handling of the brush by the greatest of the Venetians such as Titian or Veronese, and still less to the oil painting of 17th-century masters like Rubens or Rembrandt or Velazquez. It is quite clear that whatever improvements in oil technique were due to the early Flemings, oil painting in the modern sense owes still more to the Venetians, who first taught the world the full artistic possibilities of the process. Giovanni Bellini, whose noble altarpiece in S. Pietro at Murano may be called, in a phrase once applied to another of his pictures, “the canon of Venetian art,” is probably entitled to be called the father of modern oil painting. Beginning as a painter in tempera and adopting the new process about 1475, Bellini was able so far to master the new medium that he handed it on with all its possibilities indicated to Giorgione, Palma and Titian. That Venetian oil painting however, with all its brilliancy and freedom, was a child of the older tempera technique is shown by its characteristic method, which consisted in an underpainting in dead colour, over which were superimposed the transparent glazes that secured the characteristic Venetian richness of colouring. Now all the recent writers on the Van Eyck technique agree that, whatever were the exact media employed, the tempera tradition, and perhaps the tempera vehicles, were maintained for the underpainting. In the old tempera-panel technique of Cennino there was a monochrome underpainting in a greenish pigment, over which the flesh tints were spread in thin layers so as never completely to obliterate the ground. Such an underpainting in a few simple colours, black, white and red, was employed by Titian and others of the Venetians, and over it were laid the rich juicy transparent pigments, till “little by little he would have covered with real living flesh these first abstracts of his intention” (Boschini). There is some evidence that in many cases these underpaintings were in tempera, which would have the advantage of drying more quickly than underpaintings in oil, and Boschini (Le Ricche minere della pittura veneziana, 1674) expressly says that the blues in Venetian paintings, e.g. by Veronese, were painted often a guazzo. There was a reason, however, why the Venetians would alter the traditional practice of the Flemish forerunners. The latter were almost entirely panel painters, while the Venetians used canvas. Now certain media, like the hard pine-balsams which Dr Laurie thinks were the basis of the Van Eyck medium, are suitable for the immovable surfaces of a well-grounded panel, but would be liable to crack on canvas which is more or less yielding. Hence the tougher oil vehicles were in advanced Venetian painting exclusively employed.
This distinction between the thin transparent pigments and those of an opaque body, which is as old as oil painting in any form, becomes in the hands of Bellini and the later Venetians the fundamental principle of the technique. The full advantage of this thinness and transparency is gained by the use of the pigments in question as “glazes” over a previously laid solid impasto. This impasto may be modelled up in monochrome or in any desired tints chosen to work in with the colours of the superimposed glazes. Effects of colour of great depth and brilliancy may thus be obtained, and after the glaze has been floated over the surface a touch of the thumb, where the underpainting is loaded and lights are required, will so far thin it as to let the underlying colour show through and blend with the deeper tint of the glaze in the shadows. Thus in the noble Veronese in ​ the London National Gallery, called the “Consecration of St Nicholas,” the kneeling figure of the saint is robed in green with sleeves of golden orange. This latter colour is evidently carried through as underpainting over the whole draped portions of the figure, the green being then floated over and so manipulated that the golden tint shows through in parts and gives the high lights on the folds.
Again the relation of the two kinds of pigment may be reversed, and the full-bodied ones mixed with white may be struck into a previously laid transparent tint. The practice of painting into a wet glaze or rubbing was especially characteristic of the later Flemings, with Rubens at their head, and this again, though a polar opposite to that of the Venetians, is also derived from the earlier tempera, or modified tempera, techniques. The older tempera panels, when finished, were, as we have seen, covered with a coating of oil varnish generally of a warm golden hue, and in some parts they were, as Cennino tells us, glazed with transparent oil paint. Now Van Mander tells us in the introduction to his Schilderboek of 1604, verse 17, that the older Flemish and German oil painters. Van Eyck, Dürer and others, were accustomed, over a slightly painted monochrome of water-colour in which the drawing was carefully made out, to lay a thin coat of semi-transparent flesh tint in oil, through which the underpainting was still visible, and to use this as the ground for their subsequent operations. In the fully matured practice of Rubens this thin glaze became a complete painting of the shadows in rubbings of deep rich transparent oily pigment, into which the half-tones and the lights were painted while it was still wet. Descamps, in his Vie des peintres flamands (Paris, 1753), describes Rubens’s method of laying in his shadows without any use of white, which he called the poison of this part of the picture, and then painting into them with solid pigment to secure modelling by touches laid boldly side by side, and afterwards tenderly fused by the brush. Over this preparation the artist would return with the few decided strokes which are the distinctive signs-manual of the great master. The characteristic advantages of this method of work are, first, breadth, and second, speed. The under tint, often of a rich soft umber or brown, being spread equally over the canvas makes its presence felt throughout, although all sorts of colours and textures may be painted into it. Hence the whole preserves a unity of effect that is highly pictorial. Further, as the whole beauty of the work depends on the skill of hand by which the solid pigment is partly sunk into the glaze at the shadow side, while it comes out drier and stronger in the lights, and as this must be done rightly at once or not at all, the process under a hand like that of Rubens is a singularly rapid one. Exquisite are the effects thus gained when the under tint is allowed to peep through here and there, blending with the solid touches to produce the subtlest effects of tone and colour.
Of these two distinct and indeed contrasted methods of handling oil pigment, with solid or with transparent underpainting, that of the Flemings has had most effect on later practice. The technique dominated on the whole the French school of the 18th century, and has had a good deal of influence on the painting of Scotland. In general, however, the oil painting of the 17th and succeeding centuries has not been bound by any distinctive rules and methods. Artists have felt themselves free, perhaps to an undue extent, in their choice of media, and it must be admitted that very good results have been achieved by the use of the simplest vehicles that have been known throughout the whole history of the art. If Rembrandt begin in the Flemish technique, Velazquez uses at first solid underpaintings of a somewhat heavy kind, but when these masters attain to full command of their media they paint apparently without any special system, obtaining the results they desired, now by one process and now again by another, but always working in a free untrammelled spirit, and treating the materials in the spirit of a master rather than of a slave. In modern painting generally we can no longer speak of established processes and methods of work, for every artist claims the right to experiment at his will, and to produce his result in the way that suits his own individuality and the special nature of the task before him.
§ 45. Water-Colour Painting.—(Cosmo Monkhouse, The Earlier English Water-Colour Painters, 2nd ed., London, 1897; Redgrave, A Century of Painters; and Hamerton, The Graphic Arts, contain chapters on this subject.)
Water-colour painting, as has been said, is only a particular form of tempera, in which the pigments are mixed with gum to make them adhere, and often with honey or glycerin to prevent them drying too fast. The surface operated on is for the most part paper, though “miniature” painting is in water-colour on ivory. The technique was in use for the illustrated papyrus rolls in ancient Egypt, and the illuminated MSS. of the medieval period. As a rule the pigments used in the MSS. were mixed with white and were opaque or “body” colours, while water-colour painting in the modern sense is mostly transparent, though the body-colour technique is also employed. There is no historical connexion between the water-colour painting on the vellum of medieval MSS. and the modern practice. Modern water-colour painting is a development rather from the drawings, which the painters from the 15th to the 17th century were constantly executing in the most varied media. Among the processes employed was the reinforcement of an outline drawing with the pen by means of a slight wash of the same colour, generally a brown. In these so-called pen-and-wash drawings artists like Rembrandt were fond of recording their impressions of nature, and the water-colour picture was evolved through the gradual development in importance of the wash as distinct from the line, and by the gradual addition to it of colour. It is true that we find some of the old masters occasionally executing fully-tinted water-colour drawings quite in a modern spirit. There are landscape studies in body-colour of this kind by Dürer and by Rubens. These are, however, of the nature of accidents, and the real development of the technique did not begin till the 18th century, when it was worked out, for the most part in England, by artists of whom the most important were Paul Sandby and John Robert Cozens, who flourished during the latter half of the 18th century. First the wash, which had been originally quite flat, and a mere adjunct to the pen outline, received a certain amount of modelling, and the advance was quickly made to a complete monochrome in which the firm outline still played an important part. The element of colour was first introduced in the form of neutral tints, a transparent wash of cool grey being used for the sky and distance, and a comparatively warm tint of brown for the foreground. “The progress of English water-colour,” writes Mr Monkhouse, “was from monochrome through neutral tint to full colour.” Cozens produced some beautiful atmospheric effects with these neutral tints, though the rendering of nature was only conventional, but it was reserved for the second generation of English water-colour artists to develop the full resources of the technique. This generation is represented centrally by Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) and J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), the latter of whom is by far the greatest representative of the art that has hitherto appeared. To Girtin, who died young and whose genius, like that of Masaccio, developed early, is due the distinction of creating water-colour painting as an art dealing with the tones and colours of nature as they had been dealt with in the older media. W. H. Pyne, a contemporary water-colour artist who also wrote on the art, says of Girtin that he “prepared his drawings on the same principle which had hitherto been confined to painting in oil, namely, laying in the object upon his paper with the local colour, and shading the same with the individual tint of its own shadow. Previous to the practice of Turner and Girtin, drawings were shaded first entirely through, whatever their component parts—houses, cattle, trees, mountains, foregrounds, middle-ground and distances, all with black or grey, and these objects were afterwards stained or tinted, enriched or finished, as is now the custom to colour prints. It was the new practice, introduced by these distinguished artists, that acquired for designs in water-colours upon paper the title of paintings.”
​ Girtin “opened the gates of the art” and Turner entered in. If the palette of the former was still restricted, Turner exhausted all the resources of the colour box, and moreover enriched the art by adding to the traditional transparent washes the effects to be gained from the use of body colour. Body colours, however, were not only laid on by Turner with the solid impasto of the medieval illuminations. He was an adept at dragging thin films of them over a tinted ground so as to secure the subtle colour effects which can also be won in pastel. It would be useless to attempt any account of the technical methods of Turner or of the more modern practitioners in the art, for as in modern oil painting so here, each artist feels at liberty to adopt any media and processes which seem to promise the result he has in view. The varieties of paper used in modern water-colour practice are very numerous, and the idiosyncrasy of each artist expresses itself in the way he will manipulate his ground; superinduce one over the other his transparent washes; load with solid body colour; sponge or scratch the paper, or adopt any of the hundred devices in which modern practice of painting is so rife. (G. B. B.)
General Authorities on Technique.—Hamerton, The Graphic Arts: A Treatise on the Varieties of Drawing, Painting and Engraving (London, 1882), a work combining technical and artistic information, is the best single book on this subject. More archaeological is Berger, Beiträge zur Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Maltechnik (Munich, 1897–1904; partly in second editions. The last part is yet to come). The series Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Vienna, various dates from 1871) contains many publications of much value, among them being, i., Cennino Cennini, Das Buch von der Kunst, German trans, of the Trattato, with note by Ilg; vii., Theophilus, Schedula diversarum artium, Ger. trans, by Ilg. Cennino’s Trattato has also been edited in English by Mrs Herringham (London, 1899). Mr Merrifield, Ancient Practice of Painting (2 vols., London, 1849), and Sir Charles Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting (2 vols., 1849 and 1869), are valuable standard works. Information as to Byzantine processes is to be found in the Mount Athos Handbook in “Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine,” by Didron the elder (Paris, 1845). Church, The Chemistry of Paints and Painting (3rd ed., London, 1901), is by far the best book on its subject. Vasari on Technique, trans. by Miss Maclehose and edited with commentary by Baldwin Brown (London, 1907), contains a good deal of information. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Die Technik der Malerei (Leipzig, no date); Vibert, La Science de la peinture (Paris, 1890), may also be mentioned.
Recent Schools of Painting British.
At the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century British art was held to be in a vigorous and authoritative position. During the years immediately preceding it had been developing with regularity and had displayed a vitality which seemed to be full of promise. It was supported by a large array of capable workers; it had gained the widest recognition from the public; and it was curiously free from those internal conflicts which diminish the strength of an appeal for popular appreciation. There were then few sharp divergences or subdivisions of an important kind. The leadership of the Royal Academy was generally conceded, and its relations with the mass of outside artists were little wanting in cordiality. One of the chief reasons for this understanding was that at this time an almost unprecedented approval was enjoyed by nearly all classes of painters. Picture-collecting had become a general fashion, and even the youngest workers received encouragement directly they gave evidence of a reasonable share of capacity. The demand was equal to the supply; and though the number of men who were adopting the artistic profession was rapidly increasing, there seemed little danger of over-production. Pictorial art had established upon all sorts of people a hold too strong, as it seemed, to be affected by change of fashion. All pointed in the direction of a permanent prosperity.
Subsequent events provided a curious commentary on the anticipations which were reasonable enough in 1875. That year is now seen to have been, not the beginning of an era of unexampled success for British pictorial art, but rather the culminating point of preceding activity. During the period which has succeeded we have witnessed a rapid decline in the popular interest in picture-painting and a marked alteration in the conditions under which artists have had to work. In the place of the former sympathy between the public and the producers, there grew up something which almost approached indifference to their best and sincerest efforts. Simultaneously there developed a great amount of internal dissension and of antagonism between different sections of the art community. As an effect of these two causes, a new set of circumstances came into existence, and the aspect of the British school underwent a radical change. Many art workers found other ways of using their energies. The slackening of the popular demand inclined them to experiment, and to test forms of practice which formerly were not accorded serious attention, and it led to the formation of detached hostile groups of artists always ready to contend over details of technical procedure. Restlessness became the dominant characteristic of the British school, along with some intolerance of the popular lack of sympathy.
The first sign of the coming change appeared very soon after 1875. The right of the Royal Academy to define and direct the policy of the British school was disputed in 1877, when the Grosvenor Gallery was started “with the intention of giving special advantages of exhibition to artists of established reputation, some of whom The Grosvenor Gallery and the Academy. have previously been imperfectly known to the public.” This exhibition gallery was designed not so much as a rival to the Academy, as to provide a place where could be collected the works of those men who did not care to make their appeal to the public through the medium of a large and heterogeneous exhibition. As a rallying place for the few unusual painters, standing apart from their fellows in conviction and method, it had good reason for existence; and that it was not regarded at Burlington House as a rival was proved by the fact that among the contributors to the first exhibition were included Sir Francis Grant, the President of the Royal Academy, and such artists as Leighton, Millais, G. F. Watts, Alma-Tadema, G. D. Leslie and E. J. Poynter, who were at the time Academicians or Associates. With them, however, appeared such men as Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Walter Crane, W. B. Richmond and J. McN. Whistler, who had not heretofore obtained the publicity to which they were entitled by the exceptional quality and intention of their work. There was doubtless some suggestion that the Academy was not keeping touch with the more important art movements, for shortly after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery there began that attack upon the official art leaders which has been one of the most noteworthy incidents in recent art history in Great Britain. The initial stage of this conflict ended about 1886, when the vehemence of the attack had been weakened, partly by the withdrawal of some of the more prominent “outsiders,” who had meanwhile been elected into the Academy, and partly by the formation of smaller societies, which afforded the more “advanced” of the younger men the opportunities which they desired for the exposition of their views. In a modified form, however, the antagonism between the Academy and the outsiders has continued. The various protesting art association continues to work in most matters independently of one another, with the common belief that the dominant influence of Burlington House is not exercised entirely as it should be for the promotion of the best interests of British art, and that it maintains tradition as against the development of individualism and a “new style.”
The agitation in all branches of art effort was not entirely without result even inside Burlington House. Some of the older academic views were modified, and changes seriously discussed, which formerly would have been rejected as opposed to all the traditions of the society. Its calmness under attack, and its ostentatious disregard of the demands made upon it by the younger and more strenuous outsiders, have veiled a great deal of shrewd observation of passing events. It may be said that the Academy has known when to break up an organization in which it recognized a possible source of danger, by selecting the ablest leaders of the opposition to fill vacancies in its own ranks; it has given places on its walls to the works of those ​reformers who were not unwilling to be represented in the annual exhibitions; and it has, without seeming to yield to clamour, responded perceptibly to the pressure of professional opinion. In so doing, though it has not checked the progress of the changing fashion by which the popular liking for pictorial art has been diverted into other channels, it has kept its hold upon the public, and has not to any appreciable extent weakened its position of authority.
It is doubtful whether a more definite participation by the Academy in the controversies of the period would have been of any use as a means of prolonging the former good relations between artists and the collectors of works of art. The change is the result of something more than the failure of one art society to fulfil its entire Changed Conditions of British Art. mission. The steady falling off in the demand for modern pictures has been due to a combination of causes which have been powerful enough to alter nearly all the conditions under which British painters have to work. For example, the older collectors, who had for some years anterior to 1875 bought up eagerly most of the more important canvases which came within their reach, could find no more room in their galleries for further additions; again, artists, with the idea of profiting to the utmost by the keenness of the competition among the buyers, had forced up their prices to the highest limits. But the most active of all causes was that the younger generation of collectors did not show the same inclination that had swayed their predecessors to limit their attention to modern pictorial art. They turned more and more from pictures to other forms of artistic effort. They built themselves houses in which the possibility of hanging large canvases was not contemplated, and they began to call upon the craftsman and the decorator to supply them with what was necessary for the adornment of their homes. At first this modification in the popular taste was scarcely perceptible, but with every successive year it became more marked in its effect.
Latterly more money has been spent by one class of collectors upon pictures than was available even in the best of the times which have passed away; but this lavish expenditure has been devoted not to the acquisition of works by modern men, but to the purchase of examples of the old masters. Herein may often be recognized the wish to become possessed of objects which have a fictitious value in consequence of their rarity, or which are “sound investments.” Evidence of the existence of this spirit among collectors is seen in the prevailing eagerness to acquire works which inadequately represent some famous master, or are even ascribed to him on grounds not always credible. The productions of minor men, such as Henry Morland, who had never been ranked among the masters, have received an amount of attention quite out of proportion to what merits they possess, if only they can be proved to be scarce examples, or historically notorious. All this implies in the creed of the art patron a change which has necessarily reacted on living painters and on the conditions of their art production.
These, then, are the conclusions to which we are led by a comparison of the movements which affected the British school between 1875 and the beginning of the 20th century. To a wide appreciation of all types of pictorial art succeeded a grudging and careless estimate of the value of the bulk of artistic endeavour. Only a few branches Portraiture. of production are still encouraged by anything approaching an efficient demand. Portraiture is the mainstay of the majority of the figure painters; it has never lost its popularity, and may be said to have maintained satisfactorily its hold upon all classes of society, for the desire to possess personal records is very general and is independent of any art fashion. It has persisted through all the changes of view which have been increasingly active in recent years. Episodical art, illustrating sentimental Episodical Art. motives or incidents with some touch of dramatic action, has remained popular, because it has some degree of literary interest; but imaginative works and pictures which have been produced chiefly as expressions of an original regard for nature, or of some unusual conviction as to technical details, have found comparatively few admirers. The designers, however, and the workers in the decorative arts have found opportunities which formerly were denied to Decorative Art. them. They have had more scope for the display of their ingenuity and more inducement to exercise their powers of invention. A vigorous and influential school of design developed which promised to evolve work of originality and excellence. British designers gained a hearing abroad, and earned emphatic approval in countries where a sound decorative tradition had been maintained for centuries.
The one dominant influence, that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which in the ’fifties was altering the whole complexion of British art, had begun to wane early in the seventies, and it was rapidly being replaced by another scarcely less distinctive. The younger generation of artists had weaned, even before 1875, Wane of Pre-Raphaelitism and Rise of French Influence. of the pre-Raphaelite precision, and were impatient of the restrictions imposed upon their freedom of technical expression by a method of practice which required laborious application and unquestioning obedience to a rather formal code of regulations. They yearned for greater freedom and boldness, and for a better chance of asserting their individual capacities. So they gave way to a strong reaction against the creed of their immediate predecessors, and cut themselves deliberately adrift.
With the craving of young artists for new forms of technique came also the idea that the “old-master traditions” were opposed to the exact interpretation of nature, and were based too much upon convention to be adapted for the needs of men who believed that absolute realism was the one thing worth aiming at in picture-production. So Paris instead of Rome became the educational centre. There was to British students, dissatisfied with the half-hearted and imperfect systems of teaching with which they were tantalized at home, a peculiarly exhilarating atmosphere in the French studios—an amount of enthusiasm and a love of art for its own sake without parallel elsewhere. They saw in operation principles which led by the right sequence of stages to sure and certain results. In these circumstances they allowed their sympathies with French methods to become rather exaggerated, and were somewhat reckless in their adoption of both the good and bad qualities of so attractive a school.
At first the results of this breaking away from all the older educational customs were not wholly satisfactory. British students came back from France better craftsmen, stronger and sounder draughtsmen, more skilful manipulators, and with an infinitely more correct appreciation of refinements of tone-management than they had ever possessed before; but they brought back also a disproportionate amount of French mannerism and a number of affectations which sat awkwardly upon them. In the first flush of their conversion they went further than was wise or necessary, for they changed their motives as well as their methods. The quietness of subject and reserve of manner which had been hitherto eminently characteristic of the British school were abandoned for foreign sensationalism and exaggeration of effect. An affectation of extreme vivacity, a liking for theatrical suggestion, even an inclination towards coarse presentation of unpleasant incidents from modern life—all of which could be found in the paintings of the French artists who were then recognized as leaders—must be noted as importations from the Paris studios. They were the source of a distinct degeneration in the artistic taste, and they introduced into British pictorial practice certain unnatural tendencies. Scarcely less evident was the depreciation in the instinctive colour-sense of British painters, which was brought about by the adoption of the French habit of regarding strict accuracy of tone-relation as the one important thing to aim at. Before this there had been a preference for rich and sumptuous harmonies and for chromatic effects which were rather compromises with, than exact renderings of, nature; but as the foreign influence grew more active, these pleasant adaptations, inspired ​ by a sensuous love of colour for its own sake, were abandoned for more scientific statements. The colder and cruder tone-studies of the modern Frenchman became the models upon which the younger artists based themselves, and the standards against which they measured their own success. “Actuality” was gained, but much of the poetry, the delicacy, and the subtle charm which had distinguished British colourists were lost.
For some while there was a danger that the art of Great Britain might become hybrid, with the French strain predominating. So many students had succumbed to the fascination of a system of training which seemed to supply them with a perfect equipment on all points, that they were inclined to despise not only the educational Danger of the French Influence. methods of their own country, but also the inherent characteristics of British taste. The result was that the exhibitions were full of pictures which presented English people and English landscape in a purely arbitrary and artificial manner, strictly in accordance with a French convention which was out of sympathy with British instincts, and indeed, with British facts. Ultimately a discreet middle course was found between the extreme application of the science of the French art schools and the comparative irresponsibility in technical matters which had so long existed in the British Isles. In the careers of men like Stanhope Forbes, H. S. Tuke, Frank Bramley, and other prominent members of the school, many illustrations are provided of the way in which this readjustment has been effected. Their pictures, if taken in a sufficiently long sequence, summarize instructively the course of the movement which became active about 1875. They prove how valuable the interposition of France has been in the matter of artistic education, and how much Englishmen have improved in their understanding of the technique of painting.
One noteworthy outcome of the triumph of common sense over fanaticism must be mentioned. Now that the exact relation which French teaching should bear to British thought has been adjusted, an inclination to revive the more typical of the forms of pictorial expression which have had their vogue in the past is becoming Weakening of the French Influence. increasingly evident. Picturesque domesticity is taking the place of theatrical sensation, the desire to select and represent what is more than ordinarily beautiful is ousting the former preference for what was brutal and ugly, the effort to please is once again stronger than the intention to surprise or shock the art lover. Even the Pre-Raphaelite theories and practices are being reconstructed, and quite a considerable group of young artists has sprung up who are avowed believers in the principles which were advocated so strenuously in 1850.
To French intervention can be ascribed the rise and progress of several movements which have had results of more than ordinary moment. There was a few years ago much banding together of men who believed strongly in the importance of asserting plainly their belief in the doctrines to which they had been converted Groups within the British School. abroad; and as a consequence of this desire for an offensive and defensive association, many detached groups were formed within the boundaries of the British school. Each of these groups had some peculiar tenet, and each one had a small orbit of its own in which it revolved, without concerning itself overmuch about what might be going on outside. Roughly, there were three classes into which the more thoughtful British artists could then be divided. One included those men who were in the main French in sympathy and manner; another consisted of those who were not insensible to the value of the foreign training, but yet did not wish to surrender entirely their faith in the British tradition; and the third, and smallest, was made up of a few individuals who were independent of all assistance from without, and had sufficient force of character to ignore what was going on in the art world. In this third class there was practically no common point of view: each man chose his own direction and followed it as he thought best, and each one was prepared to stand or fall by the opinion which he had formed as to the true function of the painter. Necessarily, in such a gathering there were several notable personalities who may fairly be reckoned among the best of English modern masters.
Perhaps the most conspicuous of the groups was the gathering of painters who established themselves in the Cornish village of Newlyn (q.v.). This group—“The Newlyn School,” as it was called—was afterwards much modified, and many of its most cherished beliefs were considerably altered. In its beginning it was essentially French in atmosphere, The Newlyn School. and advocated not only strict adherence to realism in choice and treatment of subject, but also the subordination of colour to tone-gradation, and the observance of certain technical details, such as the exclusive use of flat brushes and the laying on of pigments in square touches. The colony was formed, as it were, in stages; and as the school is to be reckoned in the future history of the British school, the order in which the adherents arrived may here be set on record. Edwin Harris came first, and was joined by Walter Langley. Then, in the following order, came Ralph Todd, L. Suthers, Fred Hall, Frank Bramley and T. C. Gotch, and Percy Craft and Stanhope Forbes together. H. Detmold and Chevallier Tayler next arrived; then Miss Elizabeth Armstrong (Mrs Stanhope Forbes), F. Bourdillon, W. Fortescue and Norman Garstin. Ayerst Ingram, H. S. Tuke, H. Martin and F. Millard were later visitors. Stanhope Forbes (b. 1857) was trained at the Lambeth School and at the Royal Academy, and afterwards in Bonnat’s studio in Paris. His best known pictures are “A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach” (1885), “Soldiers and Sailors” (1891, “Forging the Anchor” (1892), and “The Smithy” (1895). He was elected A.R.A. in 1892, and became full Member in 1910. Frank Bramley (b. 1867) studied art in the Lincoln School of Art and at Antwerp. He gained much popularity by his pictures, “A Hopeless Dawn” (1888), “For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven” (1891), and “After the Storm” (1896), and was elected an Associate in 1894. Of late years he had made a very definite departure from the technical methods which he followed in his earlier period. T. C. Gotch (b. 1854) had a varied art training, for he worked at the Slade School, then at Antwerp, and finally in Paris under Jean Paul Laurens. He did not long remain faithful to the Newlyn creed, but diverged about 1890 into a kind of decorative symbolism, and for some years devoted himself entirely to pictures of this type. The other men who must be ranked as supporters of the school adhered closely enough to the principles which were exemplified in the works of the leaders of the movement. They were faithful realists, sincere observers of the facts of the life with which they were brought in contact, and quite earnest in their efforts to paint what they saw, without modification or idealization.
Another group which received its inspiration directly from France was the Impressionist school (see Impressionism). This group never had any distinct organization like that of the French Société des Impressionistes, but among the members of it there was a general agreement on points of procedure. They based themselves, more or less, The Impressionism School. The New English Art Club. upon prominent French artists like Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Claude Monet, and owed not a little to the example of J. A. M‘N. Whistler, whose own art may be said to be in a great measure a product of Paris. One of the fundamental principles of their practice was the subdivision of colour masses into their component parts, and the rendering of gradated tints by the juxtaposition of touches of pure colour upon the canvas, rather than by attempting to match them by previously mixing them on the palette. In pictures so painted greater luminosity and more subtlety of aerial effects can be obtained. The works of the British Impressionists have been seen mostly in the exhibitions of the New English Art Club. This society was founded in 1885 by a number of young artists who wished for facilities for exhibition which they felt were denied to them in the other galleries. It drew the greater number of its earlier supporters from the men who had been trained in foreign schools, and a complete list of the contributors to its exhibitions includes the names of many of the best known of the younger painters. It was the meeting-place of numerous groups which advocated one or other of the new creeds, for among its members or exhibitors have been P. Wilson Steer, Fred Brown, J. S. Sargent (q.v.), Solomon J. Solomon, Stanhope Forbes, T. C. Gotch, Frank Bramley, Arthur Hacker, Francis Bate, Moffat Lindner, J. L. Henry, W. W. Russell, George Thomson, Arthur Tomson, Henry Tonks, C. W. Furse, R. Anning Bell, Walter Osborne, Laurence Housman, J. J. Shannon, W. L. Wyllie, H. S. Tuke, Maurice Greiffenhagen, G. P. Jacomb Hood, Alfred Parsons, Alfred East, J. Buxton Knight, C. H. Shannon, Mark Fisher, Walter Sickert, W. Strang, Frank Short, Edward Stott, Mortimer Menpes, Alfred Hartley, William Stott, J. R. Reid, Mouat Loudan, T. B. Kennington, H. Muhrman, A. D. Peppercorn, George Clausen and J. A. M‘N. Whistler, and a number of the Scottish artists, like J. Lavery, J. Guthrie, George Henry, James Paterson, A. Roche, E. A. Walton, J. E. Christie and E. A. Hornel. A number of the men who have been more or less actively identified with it have been elected members of the Royal Academy, so that it may fairly claim to have exercised a definite influence upon the tendencies of modern art. It has certainly ​done much to prove the extent of the foreign influence upon the British school.
In its wider sense the Impressionist school may be said to include now all those students of nature who strive for the representation of broad effects rather than minute details, who look at the subject before them largely and comprehensively, and ignore all minor matters which would be likely to interfere with the simplicity of the pictorial rendering. To it can be assigned a number of artists who have never adopted, or have definitely abandoned, the prismatic analysis of colour advocated by the French Impressionists. These men were headed by J. A. M‘N. Whistler (q.v.), born in America in 1835, and trained in Paris under Gleyre. His pictures have always been remarkable for their beauty of colour combination, and for their sensitive management of subtleties of tone. They gained for the artist a place among the chief modern executants, and have attracted to him a host of followers. Other notable painters who have places in the school are Mark Fisher, an American landscape painter who studied for a while in Gleyre’s studio, one of the ablest interpreters in England of effects of sunlight and breezy atmosphere; A. D. Peppercorn, a pupil of Gérôme, who makes landscape a medium for the expression of a dignified sense of design and a carefully simplified appreciation of contrasts of tone; and P. Wilson Steer, an artist who, began as a follower of Monet, and based upon his training in the École des Beaux Arts a style of his own, which he displays effectively in both landscapes and figure pictures.
The International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, inaugurated in 1898, although not by its nature confined to British art and artists, who compose little more than half of the electorate, has its home in London. It succeeds in its object setting before the British public the most modern and eccentric expressions of the art of the chief The International society. European countries. Its exhibitions are striking and the contributions for the most part serious and interesting; but while the freedom of the artist is insisted on it is doubtful if the more exaggerated displays by rebellious painters and sculptors have had much influence on the native school. The presidents have been J. A. M‘N. Whistler and Auguste Rodin, and the vice-presidents John Lavery and William Strang: these personalities, considered along with their views and their vigour, sufficiently indicate the spirit and the politics of the society.
Generally speaking, the very large class of artists who fell only to a limited extent under the spell of French teaching includes most of the figure and landscape men and practically the whole of the portrait painters. In all sections of figure painting individual workers in improved technical methods have appeared, but most of them have gradually lost Figure Painters. their distinguishing peculiarities of manner, and have year by year assimilated themselves more closely to their less advanced brethren. The section in which their energetic propagandism has been most effective is certainly that of imaginative composition. A definite mark has been made there by men like S. J. Solomon (b. 1860; A.R.A. 1896; R.A. 1906)., trained at the Royal Academy, the Munich Academy and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and widely known by such pictures as “Samson” (1887), “The Judgment of Paris” (1890) and the "Birth of Love" (1895); and Arthur Hacker (b. 1858; A.R.A. 1894; R.A. 1910), educated at the Academy and in Bonnat’s studio, and the painter of a considerable series of semi-historical and symbolical canvases. They exercised a considerable influence upon their contemporaries, and introduced some new elements into the later practice of the school. At the same time admirably effective work has been done in this section and others by many painters who have kept much more closely in touch with the older type of aesthetic belief, and have not associated themselves openly with any of the newer movements. Among the more prominent of these figure painters there are, or have been, some excellent craftsmen, whose contributions to the record of native British art can be accepted as full of permanent interest. In the school of historical incident good work was done by Sir John Gilbert (1817–1897; R.A. 1876), a robust and ingenious illustrator of romantic motives, with a never-failing capacity for picturesque invention; John Pettie (1839–1893; R.A. 1873), a fine colourist and a clever manipulator, whose scenes from the life of past centuries were full of rare vitality; P. H. Calderon (1833–1898; R.A. 1867), a graceful and sincere artist not wanting in originality; and H. Stacy Marks (1829–1898; R.A. 1879), who treated medieval motives with a touch of real humour. Besides these, there are Sir J. D. Linton (b. 1840), who has produced noteworthy compositions in oil and water colours; Frank Dicksee (b. 1853; A.R.A. 1881; R.A. 1891), who has gained wide popularity by pictures in which romance and sentiment are combined in equal proportions; A. C. Gow (b. 1848; R.A. 1881), whose “Cromwell at Dunbar” (1886), “Flight of James II. after the Battle of the Boyne” (1888), and “Crossing the Bidassoa” (1896) may be noted as typical examples of his performance; J. Seymour Lucas (b. 1849; A.R.A. 1886; R.A. 1898), trained at the Royal Academy Schools, and a brilliant painter of what may be called the by-play of history; W. Dendy Sadler (b. 1854), trained partly in London and partly at Düsseldorf, and well known by his quaintly humorous renderings of the lighter side of life in the olden times; G. H. Boughton (born in England, but educated first in America and afterwards in Paris; A.R.A. 1879; R.A. 1896), a specialist in paintings of old and modern Dutch subjects; the Hon. John Collier (b. 1850), trained at the Slade School, at Munich, and in Paris, and a capable painter both of the nude figure and of costume; and Edwin A. Abbey, an American (b. 1852), educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Abbey came to England in 1876 with a great reputation as an illustrator, and did not begin to exhibit oil pictures until 1890; he was elected an Academician in 1898. Then there are to be noted classicists like Lord Leighton, Sir L. Alma-Tadema, and Sir E. J. Poynter’s students of the East like Frederick Goodall (b. 1822; A.R.A. 1853; R.A. 1863; d. 1904), and idealists like Sir W. B. Richmond, K.C.B.; R.A. 1895—all of whom have done much to uphold the reputation of the British school for strength of accomplishment and variety of motive.
The painters of sentiment have in the main adhered closely to the tradition which has been handed down through successive generations. Among these may be noted Marcus Stone (b. 1840), elected an Academician in 1887, an original artist whose dainty fancies are familiar to students of modern art. His pictures nearly all appeared in the exhibitions of Painters of Sentiment. the Royal Academy. Another popular artist is G. D. Leslie (b. 1835), elected an Associate in 1868 and an Academician in 1876, who has been responsible for a number of domestic old-world subject-pictures remarkable for freshness of treatment and delicacy of feeling. The list may also be held to include Henry Woods (b. 1846; A.R.A. 1882; R.A. 1893), and since 1877 a painter of scenes from Venetian life; R. W. Macbeth (b. 1848; A.R.A. 1883; R.A. 1903), whose elegant treatment of rustic subjects displays a very attractive individuality. Among the painters of sentiment should also be included Sir Luke Fildes (b. 1844), educated at the South Kensington and Royal Academy Schools, elected an Academician in 1887, the painter of such famous pictures as “The Casual Ward” (1874), “The Widower” (1876), “The Return of the Penitent” (1879), and “The Doctor” (1892); and Sir Hubert von Herkomer, C.V.O. (b. 1849; A.R.A. 1879; R.A. 1890; knighted 1907), famous not only by his many memorable canvases and by his extraordinary versatility in the arts, but also as a teacher and a leader in a number of educational movements.
Not many military pictures of high merit have been produced during the period. The artists, indeed, who occupy themselves with this class of art are not numerous, and they mostly devote their energies to illustrative pictures rather than to large canvases. Lady Butler (née Elizabeth Thompson), whose “Roll Call,” exhibited in 1874, Military Painting. brought her instant popularity, continued to paint subjects of the same type, among which “Quatre Bras” (1875), “The Defence of Rorke’s Drift” (1881), “The Camel Corps” (1891) and “The Dawn of Waterloo” (1895) are perhaps the most worthy of record. Ernest Crofts (b. 1847; A.R.A. 1878; R.A. 1896), trained in London and Düsseldorf, has taken a prominent position by such pictures as “Napoleon at Ligny” (1875), “Napoleon leaving Moscow” (1887), “The Capture of a French. Battery by the 53rd Regiment at Waterloo” (1896), and by many similar representations of historical battles. Occasional pictures have come also from A. C. Gow, R. Caton Woodville, W. B. Wollen, J. P. Beadle, John Charlton, and a few more men who are better known by their work in other directions.
The number of artists who have devoted the greater part of their energies to portraiture has been steadily on the increase. Most of the men who have taken definite rank among the figure painters have made reputations by their portraits also, but there are many others who have kept almost exclusively to this branch of practice. Into the first division Portraiture. come such noted artists as Sir John Millais, Sir E. J. Poynter, G. F. Watts, Sir Luke Fildes, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Sir L. Alma-Tadema, Sir W. B. Richmond, Seymour Lucas, the Hon. John Collier, S. J. Solomon, Arthur Hacker, Sir W. Q. Orchardson, J. A. M‘N. Whistler, Frank Dicksee, Stanhope Forbes, Frank Bramley, H. S. Tuke, T C. Gotch, P. W. Steer, John Bacon and Frank Holl. In the second must be reckoned J. S. Sargent (A.R.A. 1894; R.A. 1897), an American citizen (b. 1856), a pupil of Carolus Duran, who after 1885 was recognized as one of the most brilliant painters of the day; J. J. Shannon, also an American (b. 1862), trained at the South Kensington School, and elected an Associate in 1897, a graceful and accomplished artist, with a sound technical method and a delightful sense of style; A. S. Cope (b. 1857), trained in Paris, and elected an Associate in 1899, who carries on soundly the better traditions of the British school; James Sant (b. 1820), elected an Academician in 1870, a strong favourite of the public throughout a long career; W. W. Ouless (b 1848; A.R.A. 1877; R.A. 1881), trained in the Royal Academy Schools, an industrious and prolific worker; H. T. Wells (b. 1828; A.R.A. 1866; R.A. 1870), trained in London and Paris, who produced a long series of portraits and portrait groups, and many miniatures; W. Llewellyn (b. 1860), educated at the South Kensington Schools and in Cormon’s studio in Paris, an able draughtsman and a thorough executant; C. W. Furse (q.v.), trained ​first in the Slade School under Professor Legros and afterwards in Paris, whose early death removed a master of his art; and others like Walter Osborne, Richard Jack, Glyn Philpot and Gerald Kelly.
In the class of figure painters, who are individual in their work, and owe little or nothing to the suggestions of foreign teachers, a number of artists can be enumerated who have in common little besides a sincere desire to express their personal conviction in their own way. Among them are some of the most distinguished of modern artists, who stand out Individual Figure Painters. Decorative Painters. as the unquestioned chiefs of the school. Sir John Millais occupies a place in this group by virtue of his admirable pictorial work, and with him are W. Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, G. F. Watts, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Albert Moore and Ford Madox Brown, each one of whom may be regarded as a leader. There are also J. M. Strudwick (b. 1849), R. Spencer Stanhope (d. 1908) and Evelyn de Morgan, followers of Burne-Jones, and J. W. Waterhouse (A.R.A. 1885; R.A. 1895), in many ways the most original and inspired of English imaginative painters; and, again, M. Greiffenhagen, F. Cayley Robinson and Mrs Swynnerton. Into this class come also the decorative painters, Walter Crane (b. 1845), a prolific illustrator and picture-painter and producer of an extraordinary amount of work in branches of decoration; Frank Brangwyn, whose pictures and designs are marked by fine qualities of execution and by much sumptuousness of colour; and several others, like H. J. Draper, Harold Speed, R. Anning Bell, Gerald Moira and G. Spencer Watson. As a branch of the decorative school, a small group of artists who have revived the practice of tempera-painting must also be noted. It includes Mrs Adrian Stokes, J. D. Batten, J. E. Southall, Arthur Gaskin, and a few others with well-marked decorative tendencies.
During recent years a movement has begun which apparently aims at the revival of Pre-Raphaelitism. It is headed by a few young artists, whose methods show a mingling together of the precision of the 19th-century Pre-Raphaelites and a kind of decorative formality. The influential of the artists concerned in the formation The New Pre-Raphaelite School. of this new school is J. Byam Shaw (b. 1872), whose originality and quaintness of fancy give to his pictures a more than ordinary degree of persuasiveness. A strong colourist and an able draughtsman, he possesses in a high degree the faculty of imaginative expression, allied with humour that never degenerates into farce. His strongest preference is for symbolical subjects which embody some moral lesson. Other prominent members of the group are F. Cadogan Cowper (A.R.A. 1907) and Miss Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, who is in manner much like Byam Shaw, but yet does not sink her individuality in mere imitative effort.
The painters of landscapes and sea-pictures have for the most part been little affected by the unrest which has caused so many new departures in figure-work. A love of nature has always been one of the best British characteristics, and it has proved itself to be strong enough to keep those artists who seek their inspiration out of doors from falling Landscape Painters. to any great extent under the control of particular technical fashions. Therefore there is in the school of “open-air” painting little evidence of any change in point of view, or of the growth of any modern feeling at variance with that by which masters of landscape were swayed a century or more ago. Impressionism has gained a few adherents, and the French Barbizon school—itself created in response to a suggestion from England—has reacted upon a section of the younger artists. But, on the whole, in this branch of art the British school has gained in power and confidence, without surrendering that sturdy independence which in the past produced such momentous results. The absence of any common convention, or of any set pattern of landscape which would lead to uniformity of effort, has left the students of nature free to express themselves in a personal way. The most devout believers in the value of French training, and in the infallibility of the dogmas which emanate from the Paris studios, have not, except in rare instances, demanded any radical remodelling of the British landscape school on French lines, as local conditions affecting the practice of this branch of art make impossible all drastic alterations. Most workers in the front rank can claim to be judged on individual merits, and not as members of a particular coterie. Still, it is convenient to divide the members of the landscape school into such classes as realists, romanticists and subjective painters of landscape.
Among the most notable of the first class are H. W. B. Davis (b. 1883; A.R.A. 1873; R.A. 1877), the painter of a long series of dainty scenes which suggest happily the charm of rural England; Peter Graham, elected an Academician in 1881, who has alternated for the greater part of his working life between Scottish moorland subjects, with cattle Realistic Landscape. wandering on bare hillsides and pictures of coast scenery, with sea-gulls perched on dark rocks; David Murray (b. 1849; A.R.A. 1891; R.A. 1905), an artist whose career has been marked by consistent effort to interpret nature’s suggestions with dignity and intelligence; Sir Ernest A. Waterlow (b. 1850; A.R.A. 1890; R.A. 1903), trained in the Royal Academy and afterwards President of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, a graceful painter, with a tender colour feeling and an excellent technical style; Yeend King (b. 1855), trained partly in England, and partly in Paris under Bonnat and Cormon, a sound craftsman who made a reputation by landscapes in which are introduced groups of figures on a fairly important scale; Alfred Parsons (b. 1847), elected an Associate in 1897, who paints rich river scenery with careful regard for actuality and with much minuteness and exquisiteness of detail, especially in the rendering of flowers; and Frank Walton (b. 1840), who chooses, as a rule, landscape motives which enable him to display unusual powers of accurate draughtsmanship. To the same class of realists belonged Vicat Cole, R.A.; Birket Foster, J. W. Oakes, A.R.A.; Keeley Halswelle, and perhaps Alfred W. Hunt, though in his case realism was tempered by a delicate poetic imagination.
The romanticists and pastoral painters have in many cases been perceptibly affected by the example of the Barbizon school, but they owe much to such famous Englishmen as Cecil Lawson, John Linnell (both of whom died in 1882), George Mason (A.R.A. 1868; d. 1872) and Frederick Walker (A.R.A. 1871; d. 1875). The most prominent later Romantic and Pastoral Painters. member of the group is, perhaps. Sir Alfred East (b. 1849), trained first in the Glasgow School of Art and afterwards in Paris, elected an Associate in 1899, a painter endowed with an exceptional faculty for suggesting the poetry of nature and with an admirable sense of decorative arrangement; but there are, besides, Leslie Thomson (b. 1851), whose art is especially sound and sincere; J. Aumonier, a pastoral painter with very refined appreciation of subtleties of aerial colour; C. W. Wyllie, a painter of delicate vision and charm of presentation; J. S. Hill, whose sombre landscapes are distinguished in design and impressive in their depth of tone; R. W. Allan (b. 1852), who uses a robust technical method with equal skill in landscapes and coast subjects; J. Buxton Knight (b. 1842; d. 1908), a vigorous manipulator, with a liking for rich harmonies and low tones; Joseph Knight (b. 1838; d. 1909), whose well drawn and broadly painted pictures in oil and water-colour have been for many years appreciated by lovers of unaffected nature; Lionel P. Smythe (A.R.A. 1898), a colourist who handles exquisitely the most delicate atmospheric effects and is unusually successful in his rendering of diffused daylight; J. W. North (A.R.A. in 1893), a painter of fanciful landscapes in which definition of form is subordinated to modulations of decorative colour; Claude Hayes, who studied in the Royal Academy Schools, and carried on the tradition established by David Cox and his contemporaries; J. L. Pickering, a lover of dramatic light-and-shade contrasts and a student of romantic mountain scenery; A. D. Peppercorn, who gives breadth and dignity with sombre colour and delicate gradation of tone; Adrian Stokes (b. 1854; A.R.A. 1910) and M. Ridley Corbet (who died in 1902, only a few months after his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy), a classicist in landscape, in whose pictures can be perceived a definite reflection of the teaching of Professor Costa, the Italian master. There must also be noted, as leaders among the pastoral painters, George Clausen (b. 1852), trained first in the South Kensington School and afterwards in Paris under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury, and elected an Associate in 1895 and R.A. in 1908, who began as a strict realist and afterwards developed into a rustic idealist; H. H. La Thangue, trained in the Royal Academy Schools and in Paris, elected an Associate in 1898, an artist of amazing technical vigour and an uncompromising interpreter of rural subjects; Edward Stott (A.R.A. 1906), trained in Paris under Carolus Duran and Cabanel, who paints delicately the more poetic aspects of the life of the fields; J. Arnesby Brown (b. 1866; A.R.A. 1903); Oliver Hall, Albert Goodwin, A. Friedenson and others.
The painters of landscape subjectively considered, who conventionalize nature with the idea of giving to their pictures a kind of sentimental as distinguished from emotional suggestion, are most strikingly represented by B. W. Leader (b. 1831), trained in the Worcester School of Design and in the Royal Academy Schools, and elected an Subjective Landscape. Academician in 1898. He became a strong favourite of the public, and his academic and precise technical methods were widely admired by the many people who are not satisfied with unaffected transcriptions of natural scenes and of the passion of nature.
In marine painting no one has appeared to rival Henry Moore, perhaps the greatest student of wave-forms the world has seen; but good work has been done by the late Edwin Hayes, an Irish painter, whose powers showed no sign of failure up to his death in 1904. after some half-century of continuous labour; W. L. Wyllie (b. 1851; A.R.A. 1889; Marine Painting. R.A. 1907), trained in the Royal Academy Schools, who paints sea and shipping with intelligent understanding; T. Somerscales, a self-taught artist, with an intimate knowledge of the ocean derived from long actual experience as a sailor; and especially C. Napier Hemy (b. 1841; A.R.A. 1898; R.A. 1910), trained at the Antwerp Academy and in the studio of Baron Leys, a powerful manipulator, with a preference for the dramatic aspects of his subject. J. C. Hook (d. 1907), retained into old age the subtle qualities which made his pictures notable among the best productions of the British school. Mention must be made of John Brett (1830–1902; A.R.A. 1881), the one Pre-Raphaelite sea painter, and Hamilton Macallum ​ (1841–1896), who painted rippling water in bright sunlight with delightful delicacy and charm of manner.
The school of animal painting is a small one, and includes only a few of marked ability. The chief members include Briton Riviere, (b. 1840; A.R.A. 1878; R.A. 1881), one of the most imaginative and inventive of living artists; J. M. Swan (1847–1910; A.R.A. 1894; R.A. 1905), trained first at Lambeth, and afterwards in Paris Animal Painting. under Gérôme and Frémiet, a skilful manipulator and a sensitive draughtsman, and especially remarkable for his intimate understanding of animal character, mainly of the felidae (see also Sculpture); J. T. Nettleship (1841–1902), trained chiefly in the Slade School, whose studies of the greater beasts of prey are admirably sincere and well painted; Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch (b. 1869), trained in the Herkomer School at Bushey, who paints horses with unusual power; and John Charlton (b. 1849), trained in the South Kensington School, also well known by his pictures of horses and dogs.
There are local schools which claim attention because of the value of their contributions to the aggregation of British art. The most active of these belong to the Scottish school, the centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, which have produced some of the most distinguished British artists. The Royal Academy of London, indeed, with Scottish Schools. most of the other leading art societies, has been largely recruited from Scotland. There have been added to its modern roll the names of W. Q. Orchardson. Peter Graham, J. MacWhirter, J. Pettie, Erskine Nichol, T. Faed, David Murray, Colin Hunter, R. W. Macbeth, D. Farquharson, J. Farquharson, George Henry: all of them painters of well-established reputation; and there are many other well-known Scottish artists who have made London their headquarters, like Arthur Melville, a portrait and subject-painter and a masterly water-colourist; E. A. Walton, who is equally successful with portraits, landscapes, and decorative compositions; J. Coutts-Michie, who alternates between portraiture and landscapes of admirable quality; John Lorimer, who has exhibited a number of excellent subject-pictures and many fine portraits; T. Graham, an unaffected painter of sentiment, and a good colourist; Grosvenor Thomas, known best by his freely handled and expressive landscapes; T. Austen Brown, who paints semi-decorative pastorals with unusual vigour of statement; John Lavery, who has taken rank amongst the best of recent portrait painters; and Robert Brough, another portrait painter of vigour, with a subtle sense of colour, whose early and tragic death cut short a promising career. The most notable of the men who remained in Scotland include Alexander Roche, whose remarkable capacity has brought him many successes in portraiture, figure compositions, and decorative paintings on a large scale; W. Y. MacGregor, a leader of the school of landscape painters, fine in style and a master of effect; D. Y. Cameron, an admirable oil-painter and a famous etcher; and Sir James Guthrie, P.R.S.A. well known for his excellent portraits; James Paterson, R. B. Nisbet and Robert Noble, all landscape painters of marked originality and sound technical method; W. McTaggart (d. 1910), the brilliant impressionist; E. A. Hornel and W. Hole, decorative painters who have produced many canvases remarkable for robust originality and rare breadth of treatment; W. Mouncey, a landscape painter who united the dignity of the Barbizon school with a typically Scottish freedom of expression; and Sir George Reid, ex-P.R.S.A., one of the ablest and most distinguished of portrait painters.
The water-colour painters can fairly be said to have kept unchanged the essential qualities of their particular form of practice. They have departed scarcely at all from the executive methods which have been recognized as correct for nearly a century, but they have amplified them and have adapted them to a greater range of accomplishment, developing, it Water-Colour. may be added, the “blottesque” or the accidental manner suggestive of summary decision. Latterly water-colour painting has come to rival oils in its application to all sorts of subjects; and it is used now with absolute freedom by a very large number of skilful artists. Many of the men who have done the best work in this medium are known as oil painters of the highest rank; and among living workers the same capacity to excel in either mode of expression is by no means uncommon. There have been in recent times such masters as Sir John Gilbert, Sir E. Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A. W. Hunt, H. G. Hine, Henry Moore, Albert Moore, C. E. Holloway, and perhaps should be included E. M. Wimperis, whose water-colours are at least as worthy of admiration as their oil pictures. As water-colourists, much credit is due to Sir E. J. Poynter for his landscapes, portraits, and figure drawings; Sir L. Alma-Tadema for his minutely detailed classic subjects; Sir J. D. Linton for his historical and romantic compositions; Sir E. A. Waterlow for his delicately expressive landscapes; Sir Hubert von Herkomer for his admirably handled figure subjects; George Clausen for pastorals charming in sentiment and distinguished by fine qualities of colour; J. Aumonier, A. D. Peppercorn, J. S. Hill, J. W. North, Leslie Thomson, Frank Walton and R. W. Allan for landscapes of special excellence; E. J. Gregory (d. 1909), and Cadogan Cowper, for figure compositions painted with amazing sureness of touch; Alfred Parsons for landscapes and flower studies; J. R. Reid, W. L. Wyllie, E. Hayes and C. N. Hemy for sea and coast pictures; R. W. Macbeth, Claude Hayes and Lionel Smythe for rustic scenes with figures in the open air; J. M. Swan for paintings of animals; and G. H. Boughton for costume subjects and delicately poetic fancies. Besides, there is a long list of noteworthy painters whose reputations have been chiefly or entirely made by their successful management of water-colour, and into this list come Birket Foster, the head of the old-fashioned school of dainty rusticity; Carl Haag, a wonderful manipulator, who occupied himself almost exclusively with Eastern subjects; Thomas Collier, A. W. Weedon, H. B. Brabazon, G. A. Fripp, P. J. Naftel, G. P. Boyce, Albert Goodwin, R. Thorne-Waite, F. G. Cotman, Harry Hine, Clarence Whaite and Bernard Evans, whose landscapes show thorough understanding of nature and distinctive individuality of method; Mrs Allingham, an artist of exquisite refinement, whose idealizations of country life have a more than ordinary degree of merit; Clara Montalba, an able painter of impressions of Venice; Kate Greenaway, unrivalled as an interpreter of the graces of childhood, and endowed with the rarest originality; Mrs Stanhope Forbes, an accomplished executant of well-imagined romantic motives; and J. R. Weguelin, one of the most facile and expressive painters of fantastic figure subjects. By the aid of these artists, and many others of at least equal ability, such as J. Crawhall, J. Paterson, R. Little, Edwin Alexander, Arthur Rackham and J. Walter West, traditions worthy of all respect have been maintained sincerely and with intelligent discrimination; and to their efforts has been accorded a larger measure of popular support than is bestowed upon any other form of pictorial production.
See Richard Muther, History of Modern Painting (Eng. ed., 1895); R. de la Sizeranne, English Contemporary Art (Eng. ed., 1898); Ernest Chesneau, The English School of Painting (2nd Eng. ed., 1885); Clement and Hutton, Artists of the 19th Century (Boston, U.S.A., 1885); David Martin and F. Newbery, The Glasgow School of Painting (1897); W. D. McKay, R.S.A., The Scottish School of Painting (London, 1906); E. Pinnington, George Paul Chalmers and the Art of his Time (1896); Gleeson White, The Master Painters of Britain (1897); E. T. Cook, A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, vol. ii. (1901); J. E. Hodgson, R.A., Fifty Years of British Art (1887); A. G. Temple, Painting in the Queen’s Reign (1897); Cosmo Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists (1899); G. R. Redgrave, History of Water-Colour Painting in England 1750–1889 (1889). Also the Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art (Liverpool, 1888; Edinburgh, 1889; and Birmingham, 1890); the magazines devoted to the arts; and the principal reviews, such as “English Art in the Victorian Age” (Quarterly Review, January 1898). The Year’s Art (1879–1910; ed. A. C. R. Carter) is an invaluable annual publication fully and accurately chronicling the art institutions and art movements in Great Britain. (M. H. S.)
France
The period between 1870 and the opening of the 20th century was singularly important in the history of France, and consequently of her art. The internal life of the people developed on new lines with a vigour that left a deep mark on the outcome of mental effort. Literature was foremost in this new movement. The novels of Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, the brothers de Goncourt, Daudet, Guy de Maupassant and the plays of Alexandre Dumas fils, filled as they are with the scientific spirit and social atmosphere of the time, opened the eyes of the young generation to appreciation of the visible beauty and the spiritual poetry of the world around them, and helped them to view it with more attentive eyes, more insight and more emotion. The aim of art was also to emancipate itself, by the growing efforts of independent artists, from the slavery of tradition, and to devote itself to a more personal contemplation and knowledge of contemporary life under every aspect. Modern French art tends to become more and more the art of the people—a mixture of naturalism and poetry, deriving its inspiration, by preference, from the world of the working man; no longer appealing only to a restricted and more or less fastidious public, but, on the contrary, adapting its aesthetic or moral teaching to popular apprehension. The whole past was not, of course, wiped out. The younger generation had to learn and profit by the lessons taught by their great precursors. To understand the true character of this recent development of French art it is needful, therefore, to glance at the past.
We need not dwell on the individual authorities who constitute the official hierarchy of the contemporary French school; these masters belong for the most part, by the date of their best work, to a former generation. Starting in many cases from very opposite points, but reconciled and united by time, they carried on, during the last quarter of the 19th century, with more or less distinction, the inevitable evolution of their personal gifts. ​ We still see the works of some of the staunch Romanticists: Jean Gigoux (d. 1892), Robert-Fleury (d. 1890), Jules Dupré (d. 1889), Lami (d. 1890), Cabat (d. 1893) and Isabey (d. 1886); and with these, though they did not follow quite the same road, may be named Français (d. 1897) and Charles Jacque (d. 1894). Next to them, Meissonier (d. 1891) crowded into the last twenty years of his life a mass of work which, for the most part, enhanced his fame; and Rosa Bonheur (d. 1899), working in retirement up to the age of seventy-seven, went on her accustomed way unmoved by external changes. Hébert, Harpignies, Ziem and Paul Flandrin survived. Among the generation which grew up under the Second Empire we find men of great intelligence and distinction; some, like Alexandre Cabanel (1824–1889), by pictures of historical genre, in a somewhat insipid and conventional style, but more particularly by female portraits, firm in flesh-painting and aristocratic in feeling; others, like Paul Baudry (1828–1886, q.v.), whose large decorative works, with their pure and lofty elegance, secured him lasting fame, and whose allegorical compositions were particularly remarkable; not less so his portraits, at first vivid, glowing and golden, but at the end of his life, under the influence of the new atmosphere, cooler in tone, but more eager, nervous and restless in feeling. Léon Gérôme (b. 1824, q.v.) was the originator, during the Second Empire, of the neo-Greek idea, an Orientalist and painter of historic genre, whose somewhat arid instinct for archaeological precision and finish developed to better ends in sculpture during later years. William Bouguereau (b. 1825, q.v.) painted symbolical and allegorical subjects in a sentimental style. Jules Lefebvre (b. 1836) had a brilliant career as a portrait painter, combined, in his earlier years, with admirable studies of the nude. These were followed by Benjamin Constant (d. 1902), a clever painter of past ages in the East and of modern Oriental life, who latterly directed his powers of vigorous and rapid brushwork to portrait-painting; Fernand Cormon, the inventive chronicler of primeval Gaul, and a solid and learned portrait painter; Aimé Morot, a man of versatile gifts, a painter of portraits full of life and ease. These formed the heart of the Institut. On the other hand, we find a group who betray a close affinity with the realist party—rejecting, like them, tradition at second-hand, though returning for direct teaching to some of the great masters: Léon Bonnat (b. 1833), educated in Spain, and preserving through a long series of official portraits an evident worship of the great realists of that nation; and again, under the same influence, Jean Paul Laurens (b. 1837), who has infused some return of vitality into historical painting by his clear and individual conceptions and realistic treatment. Jean Jacques Henner (b. 1829, q.v.), standing even more apart, lived in a Correggio-like dream of pale nude forms in dim landscape scenery; his love of exquisite texture, and his unvarying sense of beauty, with his refined dilettantism, link him on each side to the great groups of realists and idealists.
About the middle of the 19th century, after the vehement disputes between the partisans of line and the votaries of colour, otherwise the Classic and the Romantic schools, when a younger generation was resting from these follies, exhausted, weary, devoid even of any fine technique, two groups slowly formed on the opposite sides of the horizon—seers or dreamers, both protesting in different ways against the collapse of the French school, and against the alleged indifference and sceptical eclecticism of the painters who were regarded as the leaders. This was a revolt from the academic and conservative tradition. One was the group of original and nature-loving painters, keen and devoted observers of men and things, the realists, made illustrious by the three great personalities of Corot (q.v.), Millet (q.v.) and Courbet (q.v.), the real originators of French contemporary art. The other was the group of men of imagination, the idealists, who, in the pursuit of perfect beauty and an ideal moral standard, reverted to the dissimilar visions of Delacroix and Ingres, the ideals of rhythm as opposed to harmony, of style versus passion, which Théodore Chassériau had endeavoured to combine. Round Puvis de Chavannes (q.v.) and Gustave Moreau (q.v.) we find a group of artists who, in spite of the fascination exerted of their intelligence by the great works of the old masters, especially the early Florentines and Venetians, would not accept the old technique, but strove to record in splendid imagery the wonders of the spiritual life, or claimed, by studying contemporary individuals, to reveal the psychology of modern minds. Among them were Gustave Ricard (1821–1873), whose portraits, suggesting the mystical charm sometimes of Leonardo and sometimes of Rembrandt, are full of deep unuttered vitality; Elie Delaunay (1828–1891), serious and expressive in his heroic compositions, keen and striking in his portraits; Eugene Fromentin (1820–1876), acute but subtle and silvery, a man of elegant mind, the writer of Les Maîtres d’autrefois, of Sahel and of Le Sahara, the discoverer—artistically—of Algeria. And round the loud and showy individuality of Courbet—healthy, nevertheless, and inspiring—a group was gathered of men less judicious, but more stirring, more truculent, thoroughly original, but not less reverent to the old masters than they were defiant of contemporary authorities. They were even more ardent for a strong technique, but the masters who attracted them were the Dutch, the Flemish, the Venetians, who, like themselves, had aimed at recording the life of their day. Among these was François Bonvin (1817–1887), who, following Granet, carried on the evolution of a subdivision of genre, the study of domestic interiors. This Drolling, too, had done, early in the 19th century, his predecessors in France being Chardin and Le Nain. This class of subjects has not merely absorbed all genre-painting, but has become a very important factor in the presentment of modern life. Bonvin painted asylums, convent-life, studios, laboratories and schools. Alphonse Legros (q.v.), painter, sculptor and etcher, who settled in London, was of the same school, though independent in his individuality, celebrating with his brush and etching-needle the life of the poor and humble, and even of the vagabond and beggar. There were also Bracquemond, the reviver of the craft of etching; Fantin-Latour, the painter of highly romantic Wagnerian dreams, figure compositions grouped after the Dutch manner, and flower-pieces not surpassed in his day. Ribot, again, and Vollon, daring and dashing in their handling of the brush; Guillaume Régamey, one of the few military painters gifted with the epic sense; and even Carolus Duran, who, after painting “Murdered” (in the Lille Museum), combined with the professional duties of an official teacher a brilliant career as a portrait painter. A later member of this group, attracted to it by student friendship in the little drawing-school which under Lecoq de Boisbaudran competed in a modest way with the École des Beaux Arts, was J. C. Cazin, well known afterwards as a pronounced idealist. Finally, there was Manet, a connecting link between the realists and the impressionists. These two radiant focuses of imagination and of observation respectively were to be seen still intact during the later period, as represented by the most energetic of the masters who upheld them.
After the catastrophe of 1870, French art appeared to be reawakened by the disasters of the country; and at the great exhibition in Vienna in 1873 Count Andrassy exclaimed to Léon Bonnat, “After such a terrible crisis you are up again, and victorious!” Immense energy prevailed in the studios, and money poured into France in consequence. The output increased rapidly, and at the same time study became more strenuous, and ambition grew bolder and more manly. Renewed activity stirred in the public academies, and a crowd of foreign students came to learn. Two great facts give a characteristic stamp to this new revival of French art: I. In the class of imaginative painting, the renewed impulse towards monumental or decorative work. II. In the class of nature studies, the growth of landscape painting, which developed along two parallel lines—Impressionism; and III. the “Open-air” school.
I. Decoration.—In decorative painting two men were the soul of the movement: Puvis de Chavannes and Philippe de Chennevières Pointel. As we look back on the last years of the Second Empire we see decorative painting sunk in profound lethargy. After Delacroix, Chassériau and Hippolyte Flandrin, and the completion of the great works in the Palais Bourbon, the Senate ​ House, the Cour des Comptes and a few churches—St Sulpice, St Vincent de Paul and St Germain des Prés—no serious attempts had been made in this direction. Excepting in the Hôtel de Ville, where Cabanel was winning his first laurels, and in the Opera House, a work that was progressing in silence, a few chapels only were decorated with paintings in the manner of easel pictures. But two famous exceptions led to a decorative revival: Puvis de Chavannes’s splendid scheme of decoration at Amiens (all, with the exception of the last composition, which is dated 1882, executed without break between 1861 and 1867), and his work at Marseilles and at Poitiers; Baudry, with his ceiling in the Opera House, begun in 1866 but not shown to the public till 1874. There was also a movement for reviving French taste in the industrial arts by following the example of systematic teaching set by some foreign countries, more particularly by England. Decorative painting felt the same impulse. Philippe de Chennevières, curator of the Luxembourg Gallery and Directeur des Beaux Arts (from 1874 till 1879), determined to encourage it by setting up a great rivalry between the most distinguished painters, like that which had stimulated the zeal of the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Taking up the task already attempted by Chenavard under the Republic of 1848, but abandoned in consequence of political changes, M. de Chennevières commissioned a select number of artists to decorate the walls of the Panthéon. The panels were to record certain events in the history of France, with due regard to the sacred character of the building. Twelve of the most noted painters were named, with a liberal breadth of selection so as to include the most dissimilar styles: Millet and Meissonier, of whom one refused and the other did not carry out the work; Cabanel and Puvis de Chavannes. The last-named was the first to begin, in 1878, and he too was the painter who put the crowning end to this great work in 1898. His pictures of the “Childhood of Ste Geneviève” (the patron saint of Paris), simple, full of feeling and of innocent charm, appropriate to a popular legend, with their airy Parisian landscape under a pallid sky, made a deep impression. Thenceforward Puvis de Chavannes had a constantly growing influence over younger men. His magnificent work at Amiens, “Ludus pro Patria” (1881–1882), at Lyons and at Rouen, in the Sorbonne and the Hotel de Ville, for the Public Library at Boston, U.S.A., and on to his last composition, “The Old Age of Ste Geneviève,” upheld to the end of the 19th century the sense of lofty purpose in decorative painting. Besides the Panthéon, which gave the first impetus to the movement, Philippe de Chennevières found other buildings to be decorated: the Luxembourg, the Palace of the Legion of Honour and that of the Council of State. The paintings in the Palais de Justice, the Sorbonne, the Hotel de Ville, the College of Pharmacy, the Natural History Museum, the Opéra Comique, and many more, bear witness to this grand revival of mural painting. Every kind of talent was employed—historical painters, portrait painters, painters of allegory, of fancy scenes, of real life and of landscape. Among the most important were: J. P. Laurens and Benjamin Constant, Bonnat and Carolus Duran, Cormon and Humbert, Joseph Blanc and L. Olivier Merson, Roll and Gervex, Besnard and Carrière, Harpignies and Pointelin, Raphaël Collin and Henri Martin.
II. Impressionism.—In 1874 common cause was made by a group of artists drawn together by sympathetic views and a craving for independence. Various in their tastes, they concentrated from every point of the compass to protest, like their precursors the realists, against the narrow views of academic teaching. Some had romantic proclivities, as the Dutchman Jongkindt, who played an important part in founding this group; others were followers of Daubigny, of Corot or of Millet; some came from the realistic party, whose influence and effort this new set was to carry on. Among these, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) holds a leading place; indeed, his influence, in spite of—or perhaps as a result of—much abuse, extended beyond his circle even so far as to affect academic teaching itself. He was first a pupil of Couture, and then, after Courbot, his real masters were the Spaniards—Velasquez, El Greco and Goya—all of whom he closely studied at the beginning of his career; but he soon felt the influence of Millet and of Corot. With a keen power of observation, he refined and lightened his style, striving for a subtle rendering of the exact relations of tone and values in light and atmosphere. With him, forming the original group, as represented by the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg, we find some landscape painters: Claude Monet, the painter of pure daylight, and the artist who by the title of one of his pictures, “An Impression,” gave rise to the designation accepted by the group; Camille Pissarro, who at one time carried to an extreme the principle of dotting with pure tints, known as pointillisme, or dotwork; Sisley, Cézanne and others. Among those who by preference studied the human figure were Edgard Degas (q.v.) and Auguste Renoir. After long and violent antagonism, such as had already greeted the earlier innovators, these painters, in spite of many protests, were officially recognized both at the Luxembourg and at the great Exhibition of 1900. Their aims have been various, some painting Man and some Nature. In the former case they claim to have gone back to the principle of the greatest artists and tried to record the life of their own time. Manet, Degas and Renoir have shown us aspects of city or vulgar life which had been left to genre-painting or caricature, but which they have represented with the charm of pathos, or with the bitter irony of their own mood, frank transcripts of life with a feeling for style. For those who painted the scenery of nature there was an even wider field. They brought to their work a new visual sense, released from the clinging memories of past art; they endeavoured to fix the transient effects of moving life, changing under the subtlest and most fugitive effects of light and atmosphere, and the play of what may be called the elements of motion—sunshine, air and clouds—caring less for the exact transcript of motionless objects, which had hitherto been almost exclusively studied, such as the soil, trees and rocks, the inanimate features of the landscape. They introduced a fresh lightness of key, which had been too subservient to the relations of values; they discovered for their ends a new class of subjects essentially modern: towns, streets, railway stations, factories, coal-mines, ironworks and smoke, which they represent with an intelligent adaptation of Japanese art, taking new and audacious points of view, constantly varying the position of their horizon. This is indeed the very acme of naturalism, the last possible stage of modern landscape, covering the whole field of observation, doubling back to the starting-point of imagination. Notwithstanding—or because of—the outcry, of these views, peculiarities and tendencies soon penetrated schools and studios. Three artists in particular became conspicuous among the most individual and most independent spirits: Besnard, who had taken the Grand Prix de Rome, and carried to the highest pitch his inexhaustible and charming fancy in studies of the figure under the most unexpected play of light; Carrière, a pupil of Cabanel, who sought and found in mysterious gloom the softened spirit of the humble, the warm caress of motherhood; and Raffaëlli, a pupil of Gérôme, who brought to light the unrecognized picturesqueness of the lowest depths of humanity.
III. The “Plein-air,” or Open-air, School.—The same causes explain the rise of the particular class of work thus commonly designated. Between Millet and Courbet, both redolent of the romantic and naturalistic influences of their time, though apart from them, stands an artist who had some share in establishing the continuity of the line of painters who combined figure-painting with landscape. This is Jules Breton (b. 1827, q.v.). More supple than his fellows, less harsh and less wilful, caring more for form and charm, he found it easier to treat “masses,” and contributed to diffuse a taste for the artistic presentment and glorification of field labour. He was the chief link between a past style and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884, q.v.), who was in fact the founder of the school of open-air painting, a compromise between the academic manner and the new revolutionary ideas, a sort of academic continuation of the naturalistic evolution, which therefore exerted considerable influence on contemporary art. As a pupil of Cabanel and the Academy schools. ​ enamoured of rustic life, he absorbed at an early stage, though not without hesitation, the love of atmospheric effects characteristic of Corot and of Manet. In his open-air heads and rural scenes he is seen as a conscientious nature worshipper, accurate and sincere, and, like Millet, imbued with a touch of mysticism which becomes even more evident in his immediate pupils. Round him there arose a little galaxy of painters, some more faithful to tradition, some followers of the best innovators, who firmly tread this path of light and modern life. These are Butin, Duez and Renouf, Roll and Gervex, Dagnan-Bouveret, Friant, Adolphe and Victor Binet and many more.
Immediately after the Exhibition of 1889 an event took place which was not without effect on the progress of French art. This was the schism in the Salon. The audacious work of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, which left anything that the Impressionists could do far behind, had accustomed the eyes of the public to the most daring attempts, while the numerous contributions of foreigners, especially from the north, where art aimed solely at a direct presentment of daily life, was a fresh encouragement to the study of modern conditions and of the lower classes. But, at the same time, the encroachment on space at the Exhibition (where no limit of number was imposed) by mere studies, hastened the reaction against the extravagances of the degenerate followers of Courbet, Manet and Bastien-Lepage. Remonstrances arose against their perverse and narrow-minded devotion to “truth,” or rather to minute exactitude, their pedantry and affectation of documentation; sometimes derived from some old colourists who had not renounced their former ideal, sometimes from younger men impelled unconsciously by literature, which had as usual preceded art in the revolt. The protest was seen, too, in a modified treatment of landscape, which took on the warmer colours of sunset, and in a choice of religious subjects, such as a pardon, or a funeral, or a ceremonial benediction, and generally of more human and more pathetic scenes.
Bastien-Lepage, like his great precursor Millet, bore within him the germs of a reaction against the movement he had helped to promote. Dagnan-Bouveret, who began by painting “Sitting for a Photograph” (now at Lyons) and “An Accident,” after painting “Le Pain bénit,” ended with “The Pilgrims to Emmaus” and “The Last Supper.” Friant, again, produced scenes of woe, “All Saints’ Day” and “Grief”; and their younger successors, Henri Royer, Adler, Duvent and others, who adhered to this tradition, accommodated it to a more modern ideal, with more vivid colouring and more dramatic composition.
Still, this normal development could have no perceptible effect in modifying the purpose of painting. More was needed. A strong craving for imaginative work was very generally felt, and was revealing itself not merely in France but in Belgium, Scotland, America and Germany. This tendency ere long resulted in groups forming round certain well-known figures. Thus a group of refined dreamers, of poetic dilettanti and harmonious colourists, assembled under the leading of Henri Martin (a strange but attractive visionary, a pupil of Jean Paul Laurens and direct heir to Puvis de Chavannes, from whom he had much sound teaching) and of Aman-Jean, who had appeared at the same time, starting, but with more reserve, in the same direction. Some of this younger group affected no specific aim; the others, the larger number, leant towards contemporary life, which they endeavoured to depict, especially its aspirations and—according to the modern expression now in France of common usage—its “state of soul” typified by melody of line and the eloquent language of harmonies. Among them should be named, as exhibitors in the salons and in the great Exhibition of 1900, Ernest Laurent, Ridel and Hippolyte Fournier, M. and Mme H. Duhem, Le Sidaner, Paul Steck, &c. On the other hand, a second group had formed of sturdy and fervent naturalistic painters, in some ways resembling the school of 1855 of which mention has been made; young and bold, sometimes over-bold, enthusiastic and emotional, and bent on giving expression to the life of their own day, especially among the people, not merely recording its exterior aspects but epitomizing its meaning by broad and strong synthetical compositions. At their head stood Cottet, who combined in himself the romantic fire and the feeling for orchestrated colour of Delacroix with the incisive realism and bold handling of Courbet; next, and very near to him, but more objective in his treatment, Lucien Simon, a manly painter and rich colourist. Both by preference painted heroic or pathetic scenes from the life of Breton mariners. After them came René Ménard, a more lyrical artist, whose classical themes and landscape carried us back to Poussin and Dauchez, Prinet, Wéry, &c.
Foreign influences had meanwhile proved stimulating to the new tendencies in art. Sympathy with the populace derived added impulse from the works of the Belgian painters Constantin Meunier, Léon Frédéric and Struys; a taste for strong and expressive colouring was diffused by certain American artists, pupils of Whistler, and yet more by a busy group of young Scotsmen favourably welcomed in Paris. But the most unforeseen result of this reactionary movement was a sudden reversion to tradition. The cry of the realists of every shade had been for “Nature!” The newcomers raised the opposition cry of The Old Masters! And in their name a protest was made against the narrowness of the documentary school of art, a demand for some loftier scheme of conventionality, and for a fuller expression of life, with its complex aspirations and visions. The spirit of English Pre-Raphaelitism made its way in France by the medium of translations from the English poets Shelley, Rossetti and Swinburne, and the work of their followers Stephane Mallarmé and Le Sãr Peladan; it gave rise to a little artificial impetus, which was furthered by the simultaneous but transient rage for the works of Burne-Jones, which were exhibited with his consent in some of the salons, and by the importation of William Morris’s principles of decoration. The outcome was a few small groups of symbolists, the most famous being that of the Rose ✠ Croix, organized by Le Sãr Peladan; then there was Henri Martin, and the little coterie of exhibitors attracted by a dealer, the late M. le Bare de Bouttiville, in which Cottet was for a short time entangled. But few interesting names are to be identified: Dulac (d. 1899), who became known chiefly for his mystical lithographs in colour; Maurice Denis and Bonnard, whose decorative compositions, with their refined and harmonious colouring, are not devoid of charm; Vuillard, &c. But it was in the school and studio of Gustave Moreau (1826–1898, q.v.) that the fire of idealism burned most hotly. This exceptional man and rare painter, locked up in his solitude, endeavoured, by a thorough and intelligent assimilation of all the traditions of the past, to find and create for himself a new tongue—rich, nervous, eloquent, strong and resplendent—in which to give utterance to the loftiest dreams that haunt the modern soul. He revived every old myth and rejuvenated every antique symbol, to represent in wonderful imagery all the serene magnificence and all the terrible struggles of the moral side of man, which he had explored to its lowest depths and most heroic heights in man and woman, in poetry and in death. Being appointed, towards the end of his life, to a professorship in the École des Beaux Arts, he regarded his duties as a real apostleship, and his teaching soon spread from his lecture-room and studio to those of the other masters. His own work, though hardly known to his pupils at the time, at first influenced their style; but, especially after his death, they were quickly disgusted with their own detestable imitation of subjects on which the master had set the stamp of his great individuality; they deserted the fabulous world of the Greek Olympus and the wonderful gardens of the Bible, to devote them to a passionate expression of modern life. Desvallières, indeed, remained conspicuous in his original manner; Sabatté, Maxence, Béronneau, Besson and many more happily worked out their way on other lines.
In trying to draw up the balance-sheet of French art at the beginning of the 20th century, it were vain to try to enter its work under the old-world headings of History, Genre, Portraits, Landscape. All the streams had burst their channels, all the currents mingled. Historical painting, reinstated for a ​ time by Puvis de Chavannes and J. P. Laurens, in which Benjamin Constant and Cormon also distinguished themselves, had but a few adherents who tried to maintain its dignity, either in combination with landscape, like M. Tattegrain, or with the ineffectual aid of archaeology, like M. Rochegrosse. At certain times, especially just after 1870, the memory of the war gave birth to a special genre of military subjects, under the distinguished guidance of Meissonier (q.v.), and the peculiar talents of Alphonse de Neuville (q.v.), of Detaille (q.v.) and Protais. This phase of contemporary history being exhausted, gave way to pictures of military manœuvres, or colonial wars and incidents in recent history; it latterly went through a revival under a demand for subjects from the Empire and the Revolution, in consequence of the publication of many memoirs of those times. Side by side with “history,” religious art formerly flourished greatly; indeed, next to mythology, it was always dear to the Academy. Apart from the subjects set for academical competitions, there was only one little revival of any interest in this kind. This was a sort of neo-evangelical offshoot, akin to the literature and stress of religious discussion; and its leader, a man of feeling rather than conviction, was J. C. Cazin (d. 1901). Like Puvis de Chavannes, and under the influence of Corot and Millet, of Hobbema, and yet more of Rembrandt, he attempted to renew the vitality of history and legend by the added charm of landscape and the introduction of more human, more living and more modern, elements into the figures and accessories. Following him, a little group developed this movement to extravagance. The recognized leader at the beginning of the 20th century was Dagnan-Bouveret.
Through mythology and allegory we are brought back to real life. No one now thinks in France of seeking any pretext for displaying the nude beauty of woman. Henner, perhaps, and Fantin-Latour, were the last to cherish a belief in Venus and Artemis, in naiads and nymphs. Painters go direct to the point nowadays; when they paint the nude, it is apart from abstract fancies, and under realistic aspects. They are content with the model. It is the living female. The whole motor force of the time lies in the expression, under various aspects, of real life. This it is which has given such a soaring flight to the two most primitive forms of the study of life, landscape and portraiture. Portraits have in fact adopted every style that can possibly be imagined: homely or fashionable, singly or in groups, by the fire or out of doors, in some familiar attitude and the surroundings of daily life, analytically precise, or synthetically broad, a literal transcript or a bold epitome of facts. As to landscape, no class of painting has been busier, more alive or more productive. It has overflowed into every other channel of art, giving them new spirit and a new life. It has led the van in every struggle and won every victory. Never was army more numerous or more various than that of the landscape painters, nor more independent. All the traditions find representatives among them, from Paul Flandrin to René Ménard. Naturalists, impressionists, open-air painters, learned in analysis or potent in invention. We need only name Harpignies, broadly decorative; Pointelin, thoughtful and austere; and Cazin, grave and tender, to give a general idea of the strength of the school.
Every quarter of the land has its painters: the north and the south, Provence and Auvergne, Brittany, dear to the young generation of colourists, the East, Algeria, Tunis—all contribute to form a French school of landscape, very living and daring, of which, as successors of Fromentin and Guillaumet, must be named Dinet, Marius Perret, Paul Leroy and Girardot. But it is more especially in the association of man and nature, in painting simple folk and their struggle for life amid their natural surroundings or by their homely hearth, in the glorification of humble toil, that the latest French art finds its most characteristic ideal life. (L. Be.)
Belgium
Belgium fills a great place in the realm of art; and while its painters show a preference for simple subjects, their technique is broad, rich and sound, the outcome of a fine tradition. Since 1855 international critics have been struck by the unity of effect produced by the works of the Belgian school, as expressed more especially by similarities of handling and colour. For the things which distinguish all Belgian painters, even in their most unpictorial divagations, are a strong sense of contrast or harmony of colouring, a free, bold style of brushwork, and a preference for rich and solid painting. It is the tradition of the old Flemish school. It would be more correct, indeed, to say traditions; for the modifications of each tendency, inevitably reviving when the success of another has exhausted itself, constantly show a reversion either to the domestic “Primitives” (or, as we might say, Pre-Raphaelites) of the Bruges school, or to the “decorative” painters of the later time at Antwerp, and no veneer of modern taste will ever succeed in masking this traditional perennial groundwork. In this way the prevailing authority of the French painter Louis David may be accounted for; as acknowledged at Brussels at the beginning of the 19th century, it was a reaction in antagonism to the heavy and flabby work of the late Antwerp school, an unconscious reversion perhaps to the finish and minuteness of the early painters of Bruges. Indeed, in France, Ingres, himself David’s most devoted disciple, was reproached with trying to revive the Gothic art of Jean de Bruges. Then, when David’s followers produced only cold and feeble work, Wappers arose to restore the methods of another tradition, for which he secured a conspicuous triumph. Classical tinsel made way, indeed, for romantic tinsel. The new art was as conventional as the old, but it had the advantage of being adaptable to the taste for show and splendour which characterizes the nation, and it also admitted the presentment of certain historical personages who survived in the memory of the people. The inevitable reaction from this theatrical art, with its affectation of noble sentiments, was to brutal realism. Baron Henri Leys (q.v.) initiated it, and the crudity of his style gave rise to a belief in a systematic purpose of supplanting the Latin tradition by Germanic sentimentality. Leys’s archaic realism was transformed at Brussels into a realism of observation and modern thought, in the painting of Charles de Groux. The influence of Leys on this artist was merely superficial; for though he, too, affected painful subjects, it was because they appealed to his compassion. The principle represented by de Groux was destined to pioneer the school in a better way; at the same time, from another side the authority of Courbet, the French realist, who had been for some time in Brussels, and that of the great landscape painters of the Fontainebleau school, had suggested to artists a more attentive study of nature and a remarkable reversion in technique to bolder and firmer handling. At this time, among other remarkable men, Alfred Stevens appeared on the scene, the finished artist of whom Camille Lemonnier truly said that he was “of the race of great painters, and, like them, careful of finish”—that in him “the eye, the hand and the brain all co-operated for the mysterious elaboration” of impasto, colour and chiaroscuro, and “the least touch was an operation of the mind.” A brief period ensued during which the greater number of Belgian artists were carried away by the material charms of brushwork and paint. The striving after brilliant efforts of colour which had characterized the painters of the last generation then gave way to a devout study of values; and at the same time it is to be noted that in Belgium, as in France, landscape painters were the first to discover the possibility of giving new life to the interpretation of nature by simplicity and sincerity of expression. They tried to render their exact sensations; and we saw, as has been said, “an increasingly predominant revelation of instinctive feeling in all classes of painting.” Artists took an impartial interest in all they saw, and the endeavour to paint well eliminated the hope of expressing a high ideal; they now sought only to utter in a work of art the impression made on them by an external fact; and, too often, the strength of the effort degenerated into brutality.
These new influences, which, in spite of the conservative school, had by degrees modified the aspect of Belgian art in ​ general, led to the formation at Brussels of an association under the name of the Free Society of Fine Arts. This group of painters had a marked influence on the development of the school, and hand in hand with the pupils of Portaels—a teacher of sober methods, caring more for sound practice than for theories it encouraged not merely the expression of deep and domestic feeling which we find in the works of Leys and de Groux, but also the endeavour to paint nature in the broad light of open air. The example of the Free Society found imitators; various artistic groups were formed to organize exhibitions where new works could be seen and studied irrespective of the influence of dealers, or of the conservatism of the authorities which was increasingly conspicuous in the official galleries; till what had at first been regarded as a mere audacious and fantastic demonstration assumed the dignity of respectable effort. The “Cercle des Vingt” (“The Twenty Club”) also exerted a marked influence. By introducing into its exhibitions works by the greatest foreign artists it released Belgian art from the uniformity which some too patriotic theorists would fain have imposed. The famous “principle of individuality in art” was asserted there in a really remarkable manner, for side by side with the experiments of painters bent on producing certain effects of light hung the works of men who clung to literary or abstract subjects. Other groups, again, were formed on the same lines; but then came the inevitable reaction from these elaborations of quivering light and subtle expression, pushed, as it seemed, to an extreme. The youngest generation of Brussels painters, in revolt against the lights and ultra-refinements of their immediate predecessors, seem to take pleasure in a return to gums and bitumen, and to seek the violent effects so dear to the romantic painters of a past time.
Brussels is the real centre of art in Belgium. Antwerp, the home of Rubens, is resting on the memory of past glories, after vainly trying to uphold the ideal formerly held in honour by Flemish painters. And yet, so great is the prestige of this ancient reputation, that Antwerp even now attracts artists from every land, and more especially the dealers who go thither to buy pictures as a common form of merchandise. At Ghent the wonderful energy of the authorities who get up the triennial exhibitions makes these the most interesting provincial shows of their kind; other towns, as Liége, Tournay, Namur, Mons and Spa also have periodical exhibitions.
From 1830, in the early days of the Belgian school of painting, we may observe a tendency to seek for the fullest qualities of colour, with delicate gradations of light and shade. In this Wappers led the way. At a time when his teachers in the Antwerp Academy would recognize nothing but the heavy brown tones of old paintings, he was already representing the transparent shadows of natural daylight. But heroic and sentimental romanticism was already making way for the serious expression of domestic and popular feeling, and thenceforward the prominence assumed by genre, and yet more by landscape, led to a deeper and more direct study of the various aspects of nature. At the same time a special sense of colour was the leading characteristic of the artists of the time, and it was truly said that “the ambition to be a fine painter was stronger than the desire for scrupulous exactitude.” Artists evidently aimed, in the first place, at a solid impasto and glowing colour; an undertone, ruddy and golden, gleamed through the paler and more real hues of the over-painting. In this way we may certainly recognize the influence of the French colourists of Courbet’s time; just as we may trace the influence of the grey tone prevalent in Manet’s day in the effort to paint with more simple truth and fewer tricks of recipe, which became evident when the “Free Society” was founded at Brussels, and the pupils from Portaels’s studio came to the front.
Among the artists who were then working the following must be named (with their best works in the Brussels Gallery): Alfred Stevens (q.v.), an incomparably charming painter, characterized by exquisite harmony of colour and marvellous dexterity with the brush. In the Brussels Gallery are his “The Lady in Pink,” “The Studio,” “The Widow,” “A Painter and his Model,” and “The Lady-Bird.” Joseph Stevens, his brother, a master-painter of dogs, broad in his draughtsmanship, and painting in strong touches of colour, is represented by “The Dog-Market,” “Brussels—Morning,” “A Dog before a Mirror”; Henri de Braekeleer, the nephew and pupil of Leys, a fine painter of interiors, in warm and golden tones, by “The Geographer,” “A Farm—Interior,” “A Shop”; Lievin de Winne, a portrait painter, sober in style and refined in execution, by “Leopold I., King of the Belgians”; Florent Willems, archaic and elegant, by “The Wedding Dress”; Eugêne Smits, a refined colourist, always working with the thought of Venice in his mind, by “The Procession of the Seasons”; Louis Dubois, a powerful colourist with a full brush, striving to resemble Courbet, by “Storks,” “Fish” Alfred Verwée, a fine animal painter, with special love for a sheeny silkiness of texture, by “The Estuary of the Scheldt,” “The Fair Land of Flanders,” “A Zeeland Team”; Alfred Verhaeren, a pupil of L. Dubois, by some “Interiors”; Felicien Rops, an extraordinary artist, precise in drawing, sensual and incisive, by “A Parisienne”; Félix ter Linden, a restless, refined nature, always trying new subtleties of the brush and palette-knife, by “Captives.” Amongst other painters may be named Camille van Camp, Gustave de Jonghe, Franz Verhas, and his brother Jan Verhas, the painter of the popular “School Feast” in the Brussels Gallery; and Jan van Beers, the clever painter of female coquettishness, represented by pictures in the Antwerp Gallery.
As landscape painters, the chief are: Hippolyte Boulenger, a refined draughtsman and a delicate colourist, represented in the Brussels Gallery by “View of Dinant,” “The Avenue of Old Hornbeams at Tervueren,” “The Meuse at Hastifere”; Alfred de Knyff, noble and elegant, by “The Marl Pit,” “A Heath—Campine”; Joseph Coosemans, by “A Marsh—Campine”; Jules Montigny, by “Wet Weather”; Alph. Asselbergs, by “A Marsh—Campine.” There are also Xavier and César de Cock, painters in light gay tones of colour; Gustave Den Duyts, a lover of melancholy twilight, represented in the same gallery by “A Winter Evening”; Mme Marie Collart, a seeker after the more melancholy and concentrated impressions of nature, by “The Old Orchard”; and Baron Jules Gœthals.
Of the Antwerp school, François Lamorinière, archaic and minute, has in the Brussels Gallery his “View from Edeghem,” and there is also Théodore Verstraete, sentimental, or frenzied.
As marine painters: Paul Jean Clays, who delights in vivid effects of colour, is represented at Brussels by “The Antwerp Roadstead,” “Calm on the Scheldt”; Louis Artan, who prefers dark and powerful effects, by “The North Sea,” besides Robert Mols, A. Bouvier, and Lemayeur.
As painters of town scenery may be named F. Stroobant, a draughtsman rather than a painter, who is represented in the Brussels Gallery by “The Grande Place at Brussels,” and J. B. Van More, a colourist chiefly, by “The Cathedral at Belem.”
The flower painter, Jean Robie, has in the Brussels Gallery “Flowers and Fruit.”
Jean Portaels, the painter of “A Box at the Theatre,” at Budapest, is represented in the Brussels Gallery by “The Daughter of Sion Insulted”; Émile Wauters, a master of free and solid brushwork, equally skilled in portraiture, historical composition and decorative portrait painting, by “The Madness of Hugo van der Goes”; Edouard Agneessens, a genuine painter, with breadth of vision and facile execution, by portraits; André Hennebicq, a painter of historical subjects, by “Labourers in the Campagna, Rome”; Isidore Verheyden, a landscapist and portrait painter, by “Woodcutters”; Eugène Verdyen and Émile Charlet should be mentioned, and the landscape painter Henri van der Hecht, whose “On the Sandhills” is in the Brussels Gallery.
The principal landscape painters of what is known as the “neutral tint” school (l’École du gris) are: Théodore Baron, faithful to the sterner features of Belgian scenery, represented in the Brussels Gallery by “A Winter Scene—Condroz”; Adrien Joseph Heymans, a careful student of singular effects of light, by “Springtime”; Jacques Rosseels, a painter of the cheerful brightness of the Flemish country, by “A Heath,” besides Isidore Meyers and Florent Crabeels.
Some figure painters who may be added to this group are: Charles Hermans, whose picture “Dawn” (Brussels Gallery), exhibited in 1875, betrays the ascendancy of the principles upheld by the Free Society of Fine Arts; Jean de la Hoese, who has since made portraits his special line; Émile Sacré; Léon Philippet, represented in the Brussels Gallery by “The Murdered Man”; and Jan Stobbaerts, a masterly painter, powerful but coarse, by “A Farm—Interior.”
Three more artists were destined to greater fame: Constantin Meunier, a highly respected artist, equally a painter and a sculptor, known as the Millet of the Flemish workman, who has depicted with noble feeling his admiration and pity for one contemporary state of the human race, and who is represented in the Brussels Gallery by “The Peasants’ War”; Xavier Mellery, who tries to express in works of high artistic merit the inner life of men and things, and personifications of thought, by “A Drawing”; and Alexandre Struys, a strong and clever painter, expressing his sympathy with poverty and misfortune in works of remarkable ability.
Besides these, Charles Verlat, a powerful and skilled artist, painted a vast variety of subjects; his teaching was influential in the Antwerp Academy. In the Brussels Gallery he is represented by “Godfrey de Bouillon at the Siege of Jerusalem,” “A Flock of Sheep attacked by an Eagle”; Alfred Cluysenaar, whose aim is to produce decorative work on an enormous scale, by “Canossa”; Albrecht de Vriendt, by “Homage done to Charles V. as a Child”; Juliaan de Vriendt, by “A Christmas Carol”; Victor Lagye, by ​ “The Witch.” Franz Vinck, Wilhelm Geets, Karl Ooms, and P. van der Ouderaa, endeavour to perpetuate, while softening down, the style of historical painting so definitely formulated by Leys. Finally, Joseph Stallaert, a painter of classical subjects, is represented in the Brussels Gallery by “The Death of Dido.” Eugene Devaux, a remarkable draughtsman, should also be named.
Works by all those artists were to be seen in the Historical Exhibition of Belgian Art at Brussels, 1880. Camille Lemonnier, in his History of the Fine Arts in Belgium, discussed this Exhibition very fully, pointing out three distinct periods in the history of the century. The first, romantic, literary and artificial, extended from 1830 till nearly 1850; the second was a period of transition, domestic in feeling, gradually developing to realism in the course of about twenty years; the third began in the ’seventies, a time of careful study, especially in landscape. This was followed by the beginning of a fourth period, characterized by a freer sense of light and atmosphere.
Apart from the exclusive tendency, inevitable under bureaucratic administration, the mere arrangement on an antiquated plan of the great academic salons was unsuited to the display of works intended to represent individual feeling or peculiarities of pictorial treatment. Hence it was that a great many painters came to prefer smaller and more eclectic shows, leading to the fashion, which still persists, of exhibitions by clubs or associations. The Fine Arts Club at Brussels had long since afforded opportunities for showing the pictures of the Société Libre, founded in 1868, which were condemned by the authorities as tending to “revolutionize” art. After this, two associations of young painters were formed at Brussels with a view to organizing their own exhibitions.
The “Chrysalide” Club was founded in 1875, and the “Essor” (the “Soaring”) Club in 1876. In 1882, however, the Essor obtained leave to open their exhibition in a room in the Palais des Beaux Arts at Brussels. This tolerance was all the more appreciated by the younger party because a new departure was in course of development, again a modification in the effort to represent light in painting. The “neutral tint” school had given way to the school of “whiteness”; a luminous effect was to be sought by a free use of brilliant colour with a very full brush. But ere long this method proved unsatisfactory, and attention was now turned towards a “sincerer and acuter perception of local values”; and again the influence of certain French painters was brought to bear—those of the group headed by C. Monet, preparing for that of the French painter G. Seurat, the first who carried into practice the systematic decomposition of colour by the process known as pointillisme (the intimate juxtaposition of dots of colour). In 1884, in consequence of a division in the Essor Club, the “XX” Club was founded, who, though thus limiting their number, reserved the right of “issuing yearly invitations, and thus testifying the sympathy they felt with the most independent artists of Belgium and with those foreign painters with whom they had the most pronounced affinity.” For ten years the exhibitions of the “XX,” whose careful and artistic arrangements were in themselves admirable, were the fount in Belgium of discussions on art. The limit of its existence to ten years was determined when the club was formed; but as it was desirable that the principle of liberty in art should still be held in honour, M. Octave Maus, the secretary of the “XX” Club, organized the exhibitions of the Libre esthétique in and since 1894. Other clubs had been formed in Brussels: the Fine Art Society in 1891 and the “Furrow” (le Sillon) in 1893. In 1894 another breach in the Essor Club, which, growing very weak, was soon to disappear—as the “Art Union” and the Voorwaerts Club had done—led to the formation of the Society “for Art” (pour l’art); and in 1896 a party of that club established a salon of idealist art which favoured an exaggeration of the intellectual tendency already begun in the exhibitions of the “XX.” Subsequently, in the exhibitions of the Sillon and of the Labeur Clubs (founded in 1898) a reaction set in, in favour of heavy brown tones and ponderous composition. At Antwerp the influence of the local societies—the “Als Ik Kan,” the Independent Art Club, and the “XIII”—was less sensibly felt; it was, however, enough to confirm certain waverers in the direction of purely disinterested effort.
It would be impossible to classify into definite groups those painters whose first distinctive appearance was subsequent to the Historical Exhibition in 1880. Only an approximate grouping can be attempted by assigning each to the association in whose exhibitions he made the best display of what he aimed at expressing. Thus it was chiefly in the rooms of the Essor Club that works were shown by the following: L. Frédéric, a remarkable painter, combining wonderful facility of execution with a sincerely simple sentiment of homely pathos, represented at the Brussels Gallery by “Chalk Sellers”; E. Hoeterickx, a painter of crowds in the streets and parks; F. Seghers, a pleasing colourist, who had made flower-painting his speciality; two animal painters, F. van Leemputten, “Return from Work” (Brussels Gallery), and E. van Damme-Sylva, as well as the marine painter, A. Marcette. The landscape painters include J. de Greet, almost brutal in style, The Pool at Rouge-Cloître (Brussels Gallery), C. Wolles, and Hamesse. L. Houyoux, F. Halkett, L. Herbo are known for their portraits. And there are E. van Gelder, J. Mayné, A. Crespin, a learned decorative painter and E. Duyck, a graceful draughtsman, “A Dream” (Brussels Gallery). As designers may be named A. Heins, a clever illustrator, and A. Lynen, of a thoroughly Brussels type, keenly observant and satirical.
At the exhibitions of the “XX” were pictures by the following: Fernand Khnopff (“Memories,” a pastel, in Brussels Gallery), an admirer of the refined domesticity of English contemporary art, and of mystical art, as represented by Gustave Moreau; H. van der Velde, a well-known exponent of the new methods in applied art; J. Ensor, a whimsical nature, loving strange combinations of colour and inconsequent fancies (Brussels Gallery: “The Lamp Man”); Th. van Rysselberghe, a clever painter, especially in the technique of dot painting (pointillisme); W. Schlobach, a remarkable colourist of uncertain tendencies; Henry de Groux, son of Ch. de Groux, a seer of visions represented in violent tones and workmanship; G. Vogels, a painter of thaw and rain; G. van Strydoneck, R. Wytsman, J. Delvin, F. Charlet, Mlle A. Boch, all of whom have striven to bring light into their pictures; W. Finch and G. Lemmen.
To the triennial salons, to the exhibitions of the “Artistic” clubs, to the House of Art (Maison d’art), at Brussels, and to the various Antwerp clubs, the following have contributed: F. Courtens, Rosseels’s brilliant pupil, an astonishing painter with a heavy impasto (Brussels Gallery: “Coming out of Church”); J. de Lalaing, full of lofty aims, but showing in his painting the qualities of a sculptor (Brussels Gallery: “A Prehistoric Hunter”); E. Claus, a lover of bright colour, and a genuine landscape painter (Brussels Gallery: “A Flock on the Road”); A. Baertsoen, who delights in the quiet corners of old Flemish towns; H. Evenepoel, a fine artist whose premature death deprived the Belgian school of a highly distinguished personality (Brussels Gallery: “Child at Play”); G. Vanaise, a painter of huge historical subjects; Ch. Mertens, a refined artist; E. Motte, an interesting painter with a love of archaic methods (Brussels Gallery: “A Girl’s Head”); A. Lévèque, an accomplished draughtsman with a distinctive touch; L. Wolles, an admirable draughtsman; J. Leempoels, elaborate and minute; H. Richir, a portrait painter; J. van den Eeckhout, a clever pupil of Verheyden; J. Rosier, a skilful follower of Verlat; L. Abry, a painter of military subjects; E. Carpentier, E. Vanhove, Luyten and Desmeth.
Essentially of the Antwerp School are F. van Kuyck, P. Verhaert, de Jans, and Brunin of Ghent, Ch. Doudelet, C. Montald and van Biesbroeck.
There is a group of artists at Liége whose sincerity and high technical qualities have been recognized: A. Donnay, A. Rassenfosse, E. Berchmans, F. Marechal, Dewitte. Of lady painters: Mmes E. Beernaert, L. Héger and J. Wytsman paint landscape; Mmes B. Art, A. Ronner, G. Meunier and M. De Biėvre paint flowers. Mmes A. d’Anethan, Lambert de Rothschild, M. Philippson, H. Calais and M. A. Marcotte paint figures and portraits.
The chief exhibitors at the Société pour l’art have been A. Ciamberlani, a painter of large decorative compositions in subdued tones; H. Ottevaere, a painter of night or twilight landscapes; O. Coppens, R. Janssens and A. Hannotiau, who study old houses, deserted churches and dead cities; F. Baes, an excellent pupil of Frédéric Fabry, O. and J. Dierickx, painters of decorative figures; H. Meunier, an ingeniously decorative draughtsman; J. Delville, founder of the salons of idealist art.
Leading exhibitors at the Voorwaerts Club have been E. Laermans, a strange artist, as it were a Daumier with anchylose joints, but a colourist (Brussels Gallery: “A Flemish Peasant”); V. Gilsoul, a clever pupil of Courtens (Brussels Gallery: “The Kennel”); J. du Jardin, the writer of L’Art flamand, an important critical work illustrated by J. Middeleer.
Contributors to the exhibitions of the Sillon Club comprise G. M. Stevens, P. Verdussen, P. Matthieu, J. Gouweloos, Bastien, Blieck, Wagemans and Smeers;and V. Mignot, ingenious in designing posters.
At the exhibitions of water-colours have been seen the works of Huberti, F. Bingé, V. Uytterschaut, Stacquet and H. Cassiers, who work with light washes or a clever use of body colour; Hagemans, who paints with broad washes; Delaunois, the painter of mysterious interiors; Th. Lybaert, minute in his brushwork; M. Romberg and Titz, correct draughtsmen.
Since 1870 several important works of decorative painting in public buildings have been carried out in Belgium. Guffens, Swerts and Pauwels have succumbed to the influences of German art, often cold and stiff; A. and J. Devriendt, V. Lagye, W. Geets and Van der Ouderaa have followed more or less in the footsteps of Leys. J. Stallaert has cleverly revived a classic style. Emile Wauters and A. Hennebicq have adopted the traditions of Historical Painting; and so too have L. Gallait, A. Cluysenaar, J. de Lalaing and A. Bourland, though with a more decorative sense of conception and treatment. But of all these works, certainly the most remarkable in its artistic and intelligent fitness is that of M. Delbeke, in the market-hall at Ypres.
See Camille Lemonnier, Histoire des arts en Belgique; A. J. Wauters, La Peinture flamande; J. du Jardin, L’Art flamand.  (F. K.*)
Holland
The entire Impressionist movement of the end of the 19th century failed to exercise the slightest influence upon the Dutch. They are only modern in so far as they again resort to the ​ classics of their Fatherland. For a whole generation Josef Israels was at the head of Dutch art. Born in 1827 at Groningen, the son of a money-changer, he walked every day in his early years, with a linen money-bag under his arm, to the great banking house of Mesdag, a son of which became later the famous marine painter. During his student days in Amsterdam he lived in the Ghetto, in the house of a poor but orthodox Jewish family. He hungered in Paris, and was derided as a Jew in the Delaroche school there. Such were the experiences of life that formed his character. In Zantvoort, the little fishing village close to Haarlem, he made a similar discovery to that which Millet had already made at Barbizon. In the solitude of the remote village he discovered that not only in the pages of history, but also in everyday life, there are tragedies. Having at first only painted historical subjects, he now began to depict the hard struggle of the seafaring man, and the joys and griefs of the poor. He commenced the long series of pictures that for thirty years and more occupied the place of honour in all Dutch exhibitions. They do not contain a story that can be rendered into words; they only tell the tale of everyday life. Old women, with rough, toil-worn hands and good-natured wrinkled faces, sit comfortably at the stove. Weatherbeaten seamen wade through the water, splashed by the waves as they drag along the heavy anchors. A peasant child learns how to walk by the aid of a little cart. Again, the dawning light falls softly upon a peaceful deathbed, on which an old woman has just breathed her last. A sad and resigned melancholy characterizes and pervades all his works. His toilers do not stand up straight; they are broken, without hope, and humble, and accomplish their appointed task without pleasure and without interest. He paints human beings upon whom the oppressions of centuries are resting; eyes that neither gaze on the present nor into the future, but back on to the long, painful past. A Jew, bearing the Ghetto yet in his bosom, is talking to us; and in his painting of the lowly and oppressed he recounts the story of his own youth and the history of his own race.
The younger painters have divided Israels’ subjects among them. Each has his own little field, which he tills and cultivates with industry and good sense; and paints one picture, to be repeated again and again during his lifetime. Christoph Birschop, born in Friesland, settled as an artist in the land of his birth, where the national costumes are so picturesque, with golden chains, lace caps and silver embroidered bodices. As in de Hoogh’s pictures, the golden light streams through the window upon the floor, upon deep crimson table-covers; and upon a few silent human beings, whose lives are passed in dreamy monotony. Gerk Henkes paints the fogs of the canals, with boats gliding peacefully along. Albert Neuhuys selects simple family scenes, in cosy rooms with the sunlight peeping stealthily through the windows. Adolf Cortz, a pupil of Israels, loves the pale vapour of autumn, grey-green plains and dusty country roads, with silvery thistles and pale yellow flowers. The landscape painters, also, have more in common with the old Dutch classic masters than with the Parisian Impressionists. There, on the hill, Rembrandt’s windmill slowly flaps its wings; there Potter’s cows ruminate solemnly as they lie on the grass. There are no coruscation and dazzling brightness, only the grey-brownish mellowness that Van Goyen affected. Anton Mauve, Jacob Maris and Willem Maris (d. 1910), are the best known landscape men. Others are Mesdag, de Haas, Apol, Klinkenberg, Bastert, Blommers, de Kock, Bosboom, Ten Kate, du Chattel, Ter Meulen, Sande-Bakhuyzen. They all paint Dutch coast scenery, Dutch fields, and Dutch cattle, in excellent keeping with the old-master school, and with phlegmatic repose.
A few of the younger masters introduced a certain amount of movement into this distinguished, though somewhat somniferous, excellence. Breitner and Isaak Israels seem to belong rather to Manet’s school than to that of Holland. The “suburb” pictures of W. Tholen, the flat landscapes bathed in light by Paul Joseph Gabriel, and Jan Veth’s and Havermann’s impressionistic portraits prove that, even among the Dutch, there are artists who experiment. Jan Toorop has even attained the proud distinction of being the enfant terrible of modern exhibitions, and his works appear to belong rather to the art of the old Assyrians than to the 19th century. But those who will endeavour to enter into their artistic spirit will soon discover that Toorop is deserving of more than a mere shrug of the shoulder; they will find that he is a great painter, who independently pursues original aims. At the present time all criticism of art is determined by the “line.” All caprices and whims of the “line” are now ridden as much to death, and with the same enthusiasm, as were formerly those of “light.” Toorop occupies one of the first places among those whose only aim consists in allowing the “line” to talk and make music. His astonishing power of physical expression may be noted. With what simple means, for example, he renders in his picture of the “Sphinx” all phases of hysterical desire; in that of “The Three Brides” nunlike resignation, chaste devotion and unbridled voluptuousness. If his mastery over gesture, the glance of the eye, be remarked—how each feature, each movement of the hand and head, each raising and closing of the eyelid, exactly expresses what it is intended to express—Toorop’s pictures will no more be scoffed at than those of Giotto, but he will be recognized as one of the greatest masters of the “line” that the 19th century produced.
See Max Rooses, Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century (Eng. ed., London, 1898–1901). (R. Mr.)
Germany
The German school of painting, like that of France, entered on a new phase after the Franco-German War of 1870. An empire had been built up of the agglomeration of separate states. Germany needed no longer to gaze back admiringly at older and greater epochs. The historical painter became neglected. Not the heroic deeds of the past, but the political glories of the new empire were to be immortalized. This transition is particularly noticeable in the work of Adolf von Menzel. At the time of political stagnation he had recorded on his canvas the glories of Prussia in the past. Now that the present had achieved an importance of its own, he painted “The Coronation of King William at Königsberg” and “King William’s Departure for the Army”; and ultimately he became the painter of popular subjects. The motley throng in the streets had a special fascination for him, and he loved to draw the crowd pushing its eager way to listen to a band on the promenade, in the market, at the doors of a theatre, or the windows of a café. He discovered the poetry of the builder’s yard and the workshop. In the “Moderne Cyklopen” (ironworks), painted in 1876, he left a monumental mark in the history of German art; for in this picture he depicts a simple incident in daily life, without any attempt at genre; and this was indeed the characteristic of his work for the next few years. Humorous anecdote, as represented by Knaus (b. 1829), Vautier (1829–1898), Defregger (b. 1835) and Grützner (b. 1846), found little acceptance. Serious representations of modern life were required; resort was made to all the expedients of the great painters, and the ’seventies were years of artistic study for Germany. Every great colourist in the past was thoroughly studied and his secrets discovered. In Germany, Wilhelm Leibl (b. 1844), holds the same prominent place that Courbet does in France. Leibl, like Courbet, (q.v.), showed that the task of painting is not to narrate, but to depict by the most convincing means at its disposal. He even went farther than Courbet in close scrutiny of nature. With loving patience he strove to translate into colour everything that his keen eye observed: he studied nature with the devotion of the medieval artist. No feeling, strictly speaking, is discernible in his work. His greatest pictures are only of quiet life, with human accessories, and his painful accuracy divests his pictures of poetry. But when he first appeared, he was necessary. His painting of “Three Peasant Women in Church” is a grand documentary work of that period, whose first aim was to conquer the picturesque. Leibl taught artists to study detail, to master the secrets of flower, leaf and stalk.
​ A great number of pupils were encouraged by him to gain such a thorough mastery of every detail of technique as to be enabled to paint pictures that were thoroughly good in workmanship, irrespective of genre or anecdote. Among these, W. Trübner (b. 1851) stands pre-eminently as a painter. His works during the ’seventies are among the best painting done at Munich during that period; they are full and rich in colour, broad and bold in their treatment of the subject. A contemporary of his was Bruno Piglhein (b. 1848), a German Chaplin in this Courbet group, not heavy and matter-of-fact, but bold and witty. He revived the art of pastel painting and pointed the way to a new style in panoramic and decorative painting, whilst infusing beauty and grace into all his works.
The movement in applied arts which began at this time is also important. The revival of the German Empire led to a renaissance in German taste. The “old German dwelling-rooms,” which now became the fashion, could only be hung with pictures in keeping with the style of the old masters, and this entailed a closer study and imitation of their works than had hitherto been customary. Wilhelm Diez (b. 1839) at the head of the group, was as well acquainted with the epoch from Dürer and Holbein to Ostade and Rembrandt as any art historian. In Harburger (b. 1846) Adrian Brouwer lived once more; and in Löfftz (b. 1845) Quintin Matsys. Claus Meyer (b. 1846) imitated all the artistic tricks of Pieter de Hooch and Van der Neer of Delft. Holbein’s costume studies were at first models for Fritz August Kaulbach (b. 1850). Later, he extended his studies to Dolci and Van Dyck, to Watteau and Gainsborough. Adolf Lier (1827–1882) applied the beauty of tone beloved by the old masters to landscape. Von Lenbach’s works show the zenith of old-master talent in Germany. He had educated himself as a copyist of classical masterpieces, and passed through a schooling in the study of old masters such as none of his contemporaries had enjoyed. The copies which, as a young man, he made for Count Schach in Italy and Spain are among the best the brush has ever accomplished. Titian and Rubens, Velazquez and Giorgione, were imitated by him with equal success. In like manner he gave to his own works their distinguished old-master charm. More than all other painters of historical subjects, Lenbach enjoys the distinction of having been the historian of his epoch. He gave the great men of the era of the emperor William I. the form in which they will live in German history, and beauty of colour is blended in all these pictures with their brilliant evidence of thought. The aspirations of a whole generation to restore the technique of the old masters found their realization in Lenbach.
Such was the position of things when there was imported from France the desire to paint light and sun. It was argued that the views which the old masters held concerning colour were in glaring contradiction to what the eye actually saw. The old masters, it was said, paid particular attention to the conditions of light and shade under which they did their work. The golden character of the Italian Renaissance was traceable to the old cathedrals lighted by stained-glass windows. The light and shade of the Netherlands were in keeping with the light and shadow of the artists’ studios lighted by little panes, and due partly to the fact that their pictures were intended to hang in dreamy, brown panelled chambers. But was this golden or brown light suitable for the 19th century? Were we not illogical, when for the sake of reproducing the tones of the old masters, we darkened our studios and shut out the daylight by coloured glass windows and heavy curtains? Was not light one of the greatest acquisitions of recent times? When the Dutch painted the world used only little panes of glass. Now the daylight streamed into our rooms through great white sheets of crystal. When our grandfathers lived there were only candles and oil lamps. Now we had gas and electric light. Instead of imitating the old masters, let us paint the colouristic charms that were unknown to them. Let us do honour to the new marvels of colour. With such arguments as were advanced in France, did artists in Germany adopt the plein-air and abandon older methods; and a development like that which took place in France after the days of Manet ensued in Germany also. Daylight, which had so long been kept down, was now to be reproduced as clear and bright. After the art of painting strong effects full of daylight had been grappled with, other and more difficult problems of light effects were attempted. After the full blaze of sunshine had been successfully reproduced, such effects as the haze of early morning, the sultry vaporous atmosphere of the thunderstorm, the mysterious night, the blue-grey dawn, the delicate colours of variegated Chinese lanterns, the scintillation of gas and lamplight, and the dreamy twilight in the interior were dealt with.
Max Liebermann (b. 1849) was the first to join the new departure. In Paris he had learnt technique. Holland, the country of fogs, inspired him with the love for atmospheric effects, and its scenes of simple life provided him with many subjects. Perhaps the “Net Menders” in the Hamburg Kunsthalle is most typical of Liebermann’s art. Frank Skarbina (b. 1849), who was the second to join the new movement in Berlin, proceeded to studies of twilight and artificial light effects.
Hans Herrman (b. 1858), who settled himself on quays and ports; Hugo Volgel, who endeavoured to utilize scenes from contemporary life for decorative pictures; and the two landscape painters, Ludwig Dettmann (b. 1865) and Walther Leistikow (b. 1865), are other representatives of modern Berlin art. Carlsruhe, in the ’eighties, produced some modern pictures of great merit, when Gustav Schönleber (b. 1851) and Herrmann Baisch (b. 1846) showed daintily conceived pictures of Dutch landscapes. In later years Count Leopold Kalckreuth (b. 1855), whose powerfully conceived representations of peasant life belong to the best productions of German realism, and Victor Weishaupt (b. 1848), the animal painter, removed thence to Stuttgart, the residence also of Otto Reiniger (b. 1863), a landscape painter of great originality. At Dresden we find Gotthard Kuehl (b. 1850), long domiciled in Paris, who was one of the first to accept Manet’s teaching. In North Germany, Worpswede became a German Barbizon; Ende (b. 1860), Vogeler, and Vinnen (b. 1863) also worked there. In Weimar, two landscape painters of great refinement must be mentioned—Theodor Hagen (b. 1842) and Gleichen-Russwurm (b. 1866). As far back as the ’seventies they rendered ploughed fields, hills enveloped in thin vapour at sunrise, waving fields of corn, and apple trees in full bloom trembling in the rays of the evening glow with a delicate understanding of natural effects.
But Munich still remains the headquarters of German art, which is there the first of all interests and pervades all circles. Almost all those who are working in other German towns receive in that city their inspirations and have indeed remained its citizens in heart. The international exhibitions have given a great European tone and impulse to creative work. Among the elders, Albert von Keller (b. 1841) has perhaps the greatest originality. He is one of those who practised the art of the brush as long ago as the ’seventies, and painted, not for the sake of historical subjects or for genre, but for the sole love of his art. He painted everything, never restricted himself to any fixed programme, and never became trivial. He is perhaps in Germany the only painter of female portraits who has caught in his pictures a little of the charm that betrays itself in the expression and movements of the modern woman. In the works of Freiherr von Habermann (b. 1849) this refinement of sentiment, as expressed in colour, is combined with a still more decided shade of eccentricity. Already in his “Child of Sorrow,” which hangs in the National Gallery at Berlin, he struck that painful chord that always remained his favourite. However different the subjects he has painted, a morbid note pervades them all.
In Heinrich Zügel (b. 1850), the Munich school possesses an animal painter who rivals the great Frenchmen in original power. Ludwig Dill (b. 1848), whom one must still count as “Dachauer,” in spite of his migration to Carlsruhe, had for some time past been famous as a painter of Venice, the lagoons and Chioggia, when the impressionist movement became for him the starting-point of a new development. He strove for still brighter light, ​ tried to realize the most subtle shades of colour, and raised himself from a painter of natural impressions to free and poetical lyricism. Arthur Langhammer (b. 1855), Ludwig Herterich, Leo Samberger (b. 1851), Hans von Bartels (b. 1856), Wilhelm Keller-Reutlinger (b. 1854), Beno Becker, Louis Corinth (b. 1858), Max Slevogt, are others that may be mentioned among the later Munich artists.
Fritz von Uhde (b. 1848) occupies a peculiar position as being the first to apply the principles of naturalism to religious art. Immediately before him, Eduard von Gebhardt (b. 1838) had gone back to the angular style of the old northern masters, that of Roger van der Weyden and Albert Dürer, believing he could draw the old Biblical events closer to present times by relating them in Luther’s language and representing them as taking place in the most powerful epoch of German ecclesiastical history. Now that historical paintings had been dispossessed by modern and contemporary subjects, it followed also that scenes from the life of Christ had to be laid in modern times. “I do not assert that only the commonplace occurrences of everyday life can be painted. If the historical past be painted, it should be represented in human garb corresponding to the life we see about us, in the surroundings of our own country, peopled with the people moving before our very eyes, just as if the drama had only been enacted the previous evening.” Thus wrote Bastien-Lepage in 1879, when creating his “Jeanne d’Arc,” and in this sense did Uhde paint. But besides the charm of feeling expressed in the subtlest hues, there is also the charm of the noble line.
At the time when, in England, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and, in France, Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, stepped into the foreground, in Germany Feuerbach (1829–1880), Marées (1837–1887), Thoma (b. 1839), and Böcklin (1827–1901) were discovered. Feuerbach’s life was one series of privations and disappointments. His “Banquet of Plato,” “Song of Spring,” “Iphigenia” and “Pietà,” and his “Medea” and “Battle of the Amazons,” met with but scant recognition on their appearance. To some they appeared to lack sentiment, to others they were “not sufficiently German.” When he died in Venice in 1880, he had become a stranger to his contemporaries. But posterity accorded him the laurel that his own age had denied him. Just those points in his pictures to which exception had been taken during his lifetime, the great solemn restfulness of his colouring and the calm dignity of his contours, made him appear contemporary.
Hans von Marées fulfilled a similar mission in the sphere of decorative art; his, likewise, was a talent that was not discovered until after his death. He is most in touch with Puvis de Chavannes. But the result was different. Puvis was recognized on his first appearance. Marées never had a chance of revealing his real strength. He was only 28 years of age when he first went to Rome; there in 1873, he was commissioned to paint some pictures for the walls of the Zoological Station at Naples. After that time, nothing more was heard of him until 1891, when four years after his death the works he had left behind him were exhibited and presented to the gallery of Schleissheim. The value of these works of art must not be sought in their technique. The art of Puvis rests on a firm realistic foundation, but Marées had finished his studies of nature too prematurely for the correctness of his drawing. In spite of this defect, they encourage as well as excite, owing to the principle which underlies them, and which they share in equal degree with those of Puvis. Like Puvis, Marées repudiated all illuminating efforts whereby forms might be brought into relief. He only retained what was intrinsically essential, the large lines in nature, as well as those of the human frame.
Next to these artists stands Hans Thoma, like one of the great masters of Dürer’s time. In Marées and Feuerbach’s works there is the solemn grandeur of the fresco; in those of Thoma there is nothing of Southern loveliness, but something of the homeliness of the old German art of woodcut; nay, something philistine, rustic, patriarchal—the simplicity of heart and childlike innocence that entrance us in German folklore. in the paintings of Moritz von Schwind (1804–1871) and Ludwig Richter (1803–1884). He had grown up at Bernau, a small village of the Black Forest. Blossoming fruit-trees and silver brooks, green meadows and solitary peasants’ cottages, silent valleys and warm summer evenings, grazing cattle and the cackle of the farmyard, all lived in his memory when he went to Weimar to study the painter’s art. This pious faithfulness to the home of his birth and touching affection for the scenes of his childhood pervade all his art and are its leading feature. Even when depicting classical subjects, the mythological marvels of the ocean and centaurs, Thoma still remains the simple-hearted German, who, like Cranach, conceives antiquity as a romantic fairy tale, as the legendary period of chivalry.
Whether it be correct to place Böcklin (q.v.) in the same category with these painters, or whether he has a right to a separate place, posterity may decide. The great art of the old masters has weighed heavily upon the development of that of our own age. Even the idealists, who have been mentioned, trace their pedigree back to the old masters. However modern in conception, they are to all intents and purposes “old” as regards the form they employed to express their modern ideas. Böcklin has no ancestor in the history of art; no stroke of his brush reminds us of a leader. No one can think of tracing him back to the Academy of Düsseldorf, to Lessing, or Schorner, as his first teacher. Even less can he be called an imitator of the old masters. His works are the result of nature in her different aspects; they have not their origin in literary or historical suggestion. The catalogue of his conceptions, of landscape in varying moods, is inexhaustible. But landscape does not suffice to express his resources. Knights on the quest for adventure, Saracens storming flaming citadels, Tritons chasing the daughters of Neptune in the billowy waves; such were the subjects which appealed to him. He endowed all fanciful beings that people the atmosphere, that live in the trees, on lonely rocks, or that move and have their being in the slimy bottom of the sea, with body and soul, and placed a second world at the side of the world of actuality. Yet this universe of phantasy was too narrow for the master mind. If it be asked who created on the continent of Europe the most fervid religious paintings of the 19th century; who alone exhausted the entire scale of sensations, from the placidity of repose to the sublimity of heroism, from the gayest laughter to tragedy; who possessed the most solemn and most serious language of form and, at the same time, the greatest poetry of colour—the name of Böcklin will most probably form the answer.
These masters were for their younger brethren the pioneers into a new world of art. It was momentous for the painter’s art that in Germany, no less than in England and France, a new movement at this time set in—the so-called “arts and crafts.” Hitherto the various branches of art had followed different courses. The most beautiful paintings were often hung in surroundings grievously lacking in taste. Now arose the ambition to make the room itself a work of art. The picture, as such, now no more stands in the foreground, but the different arts strive together to form a single piece of art. The picture is regarded as merely a decorative accessory.
Among the younger painters still to be mentioned. Max Klinger (b. 1857) is perhaps the most brilliant. He had begun with the etching-needle, and by its aid gave us entire novels, crisp little dramas of everyday life. But this realism was only a preliminary phase enabling him to pass on to a great independent art of form. His great picture, “Christ in Olympus,” combines beauty of form with deep philosophical meaning. Ibsen in 1873, in his Emperor and Galilean, talked of a “third realm,” combining heathen beauty with Christian profundity. Klinger’s “Christ in Olympus” strikes the beholder as the realization of this idea. Stuck (b. 1863) shares with him the Hellenic serenity of form, the classical simplicity. Apart from this, his pictures are thoroughly different. It might almost be said “Klinger is the Nazarene who stepped into Olympus”; the thoughtful, deep son of the North who carries profound physical ​ problems into the beauty-loving Hellenic worship of the senses. Stuck’s art is, also, almost classical in its insensibility and petrified coldness. In his first picture (1889) “The Guardian of Paradise” he painted a slim wiry angel, who, like Donatello’s “St George,” in calm confidence and self-assurance points the sword before him. And similar rigid figures standing erect in steadiness—always portraits of himself—recur again and again in his works. Even his religious pictures—the “Pietà” and “The Crucifixion”—are, in reality, antique. One would seek in vain in them for the piety of the old masters or the Germanic fervour of Uhde. Grand in style and line, firm, solemn, serious in arrangement, they are yet hard and cold in conception.
Ludwig von Hoffmann (b. 1861) stands next to him, a gentle, dreamy German. In Stuck’s work everything is strong and rugged: here all is soft and round. There the massiveness of sculpture and stiff heraldic lines: here all dissolved into variegated fairy tales, glowing harmonies. However classical he may appear, yet it is only the old yearning of the Germani for Hesperia—the song of Mignon—that rings throughout his works; the longing to emerge from the mist and the fog into the light, from the humdrum of everyday Life into the remote fabulous world of fairydom, the longing to escape from sin and attain perfect innocence.
There are numerous others deserving of mention besides those already discussed. Josef Sattler (d. 1867), Melchior Lechter (b. 1871), and Otto Greiner (b. 1869), and likewise those who, such as Von Berlepsch (b. 1852) and Otto Eckmann (b. 1865), devoted their energies again to “applied art.”
See R. Muther, The History of Modern Painting (London, 1895); Deutsches Künstler-Lexikon der Gegenwart in biographischen Skizzen (Leipzig, 1898); Mrs de la Mazelière, La Peinture allemande au XIXᵉ siècle (Paris, 1900). (R. Mr.)
Austria-Hungary
In Austria the influence of Makart (1840–1884) was predominant in the school of painting during the last quarter of the 10th century. He personified the classical expression of an epoch, when a long period of colour-blindness was followed by an intoxication of colour. Whilst Piloty’s ambition stopped short at the presentation of correct historical pictures, his pupil, Makart felt himself a real painter. He does not interpret either deep thought or historical events, nor does he group his pictures together to suit the views of the art student. His work is essentially that of a colourist. Whatever his subject may be, whether he depicts “The Plague in Florence,” “The Nuptials of Caterina Cornaro,” “The Triumphal Entry of Charles V.,” “The Bark of Cleopatra,” or “The Five Senses,” “The Chase of Diana,” or “The Chase of the Amazons,” his pictures are romances of brilliant dresses and human flesh. A few studies of the nude and sketches of colour, in which he merely touched the notes that were to be combined into chords, were the sole preliminaries he required for his historical paintings. Draperies, jewels, and voluptuous female forms, flowers, fruit, fishes and marble—everything that is full of life and sensuous emotion, and shines and glitters, he heaps together into gorgeous still-life. And because by this picturesque sensuousness he restored to Austrian art a long-lost national peculiarity, his appearance on the scene was as epoch-making as if some strong power had shifted the centre of gravity of all current views and ideas.
In estimating Makart, however, we must not dwell on his pictures alone. He did more than merely paint—he lived them. Almost prematurely he dreamed the beautiful dream which in later days came nearer realization, that no art can exist apart from life—that life itself must be made an art. His studio, not without reason, was called his most beautiful work of art. Whithersoever his travels led him—to Granada, Algiers, or Cairo—he made extensive purchases, and refreshed his eye with the luscious splendour of rich silks and the soft lustrous hues of velvets. He made collections of carved ivory and Egyptian mummies. Gobelins, armour and weapons, old chests, antique sculpture, golden brocades with glittering embroideries, encrusted coverlets and the precious textures of the East, columns, pictures, trophies of all ages and all climes. He scattered money broadcast in striving to realize his dream of beauty—to pass one night, one hour, in the world of Rubens, so bright in colour, so princely in splendour.
Uniting as he did these artistic qualities in his own person not only because he was a painter, but because in no other besides did the great yearning for aesthetic culture find such powerful utterance—Makart exercised an influence in Austria far transcending the actual sphere of the painter’s art. An intense fascination went forth from the little man with the black beard and penetrating glance. At that time Makart dominated not merely Viennese art, but likewise the whole cultured life of the capital. Not only the Makart hat and the Makart bouquet made their pilgrimage through the world, he became also the motive power in all intellectual spheres. When Charlotte Wolter acted Cleopatra or Messalina on the stage, she not only wore dresses specially sketched for her by Makart, but she also spoke in Makart’s style, just as Hamerling wrote in it. A veritable Makart fever had, indeed, taken possession of Vienna. No other painter of the 19th century was so popular, the life of none other was surrounded by such princely sumptuousness. The scene when, during the festivals of 1879, he headed the procession of artists past the imperial box, mounted on a white steed glittering with gold, the Rubens hat with white feathers on his head, amidst the boisterous acclamations of the populace, is unique in the modern history of art. It is the greatest homage that a Philistine century ever offered an artist.
The life of August von Pettenkofen (1821–1889), who should, after Makart, be accounted the greatest Austrian painter of the last quarter of the 19th century, was passed much more modestly and serenely. He had grown up on one of his father’s estates in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before becoming a painter. His place in Austria is that of Menzel in Germany. With Pettenkofen a new style appeared. The representation of modern subjects now began to take the place of historical painting, which had for so long a time been the ruling taste; not in the sense of the old-fashioned genre picture, but in that of artistic refined painting. Here, again, the distinctive Austrian note can be easily recognized. Pettenkofen’s people are lazy, and yawn. All is contemplative and peaceful, full of dreamy, sleepy repose.
But neither Pettenkofen nor Makart has found followers. The great movement which, originating with Manet, took place in other centres of art, passed Austria by without leaving a trace. Hans Canon (b. 1829), who in his pictures transported the characters of the “Gründerzeit” to Venice of bygone days, and reproduced them as Venetian nobles and ladies of quality, is also a painter of note. So likewise is Rudolf Alt (b. 1812), still active with the brush in 1902. a refined painter in water-colours, who reproduces the beauties of Old Vienna in his subtle architectural sketches. Leopold Karl Müller (1834–1892), who had lived in Cairo with Makart, found his sphere of art in the variegated world of the Nile, and his ethnographical exactness, combined with his delicate colouring, made him for a long while much in request as a painter of Oriental scenes, and a popular illustrator of Egyptological works. Emil Schindler was a great landscape painter, who often rose from faithful interpretation of nature to an almost heroic height. Heinrich von Angeli (b. 1840), again, furnished—as he continued to do—the European courts with his representative pictures, combining refined conception with smooth elegant technique. These are the only artists who during the ’eighties rose above local mediocrity. After Makart died in 1884, the sun of Austrian art seemed to have set. Stagnation reigned supreme.
Only since the “Secession” from the old Society of Artists (Künstlergenossenschaft), which took place in 1896, has the former artistic life recommenced in Vienna. Theodor von Hermann, long domiciled in Paris, was the gifted initiator of the new movement, and succeeded in rousing a storm of discontent among the rising school of Viennese artists. They found a literary champion in their hero’s father, who pleaded in eloquent language for a new Austrian culture. In November 1898 the ​ Secessionists opened their first exhibition in a building erected by Josef Olbrück on the Wienerzeil. At first the importance of these exhibitions lay almost exclusively in the fact that the Viennese were thus given an opportunity of making acquaintance with the famous foreign masters, Puvis de Chavannes, Segantini, Bcsnard, Brangwyn, Meunier, Khnopff, Henri Martin, Vischer, who had until then been practically unknown in Austria, so that the public only then realized the inferiority of their countrymen’s artistic work. Thus while acquainting the Viennese public with the striving of European art, the Secession endeavoured at the same time to produce, in rivalry with foreigners, works of equal artistic merit. Leading foreign masters now joined the movement, and Vienna, which had so long stood aside, through inability to be represented worthily at international exhibitions, became once more a factor in contemporary European art.
Among the painters of the Secession, Gustav Klint possesses, perhaps, the most powerful original talent. Refined portraits, subtle landscapes and decorative pictures, painted for the Tumba Palace and for the Vienna Hof Museum, first brought his name before the world. But he became famous in consequence of the controversy which arose around his picture “Philosophy.” He had been commissioned to paint the large ceiling piece for the “aula” of the Vienna University, and instead of selecting a classical subject he essayed an independent work. The heavens open; golden and silvery stars twinkle; sparks of light gleam; masses of green cloud and vapour form clusters; naked human forms float about; a fiery head, crowned with laurel, gazes on the scene with large, serious eyes. Science climbs down to the sources of Truth: yet Truth always remains the inscrutable Sphinx. Klint paid the penalty of his bold originality by his work remaining dark and incomprehensible to most people. It has, notwithstanding, an historical importance for Austria corresponding to that which similar works of Besnard have for France. It embodies the first attempt to place monumental painting upon a purely colouristic basis, and to portray allegorical subjects as pure visions of colour. After Klint, Josef Engelhart (b. 1864) is deserving of notice. He is the true painter of Viennese life. On his first appearance his art was centred in his native place, and was strong in local colour, which was lacking in refinement. To acquire subtlety, he studied the great foreign masters and became a clever juggler with the brush, showing as much dexterity as any of them. Yet this virtuosity meant, in his case, only a good schooling, which should enable him to return with improved means to those subjects best suited to his talent. His works are artistic, but at the same time distinctly local.
Carl Moll (b. 1861) understands how to render with equal skill the play of light in a room and that of the sunbeams upon the fresh green grass. The rural pictures of Rist produce a fresh, cool and sunny effect upon the eye; like a refreshing draught from a cool mountain spring—a piece of Norway on Austrian soil. Zettel’s landscapes are almost too markedly Swiss in colour and conception. Julius von Kollmann worked a long time in Paris and London, and acquired, in intercourse with the great foreign painters—notably Carrière and Watts—an exquisitely refined taste, an almost hyperaesthetical sense for discreetly toned-down colour and for the music of the line. In Friedrich König, M. von Schwind’s romantic vein is revived. Even the simplest scenes from nature appear under his hand as enchanted groves whispering secrets. Everything is true and, at the same time, dreamy and mysterious. The mythical beings of old German legends—dragons and enchanted princesses—peer through the forest thicket. Ernst Nowak (b. 1851), compared with him, is a sturdy painter, who knows his business well. He sings no delicate lyric. When one stands close by, his pictures appear like masonry—like reliefs. Seen from, a distance, the blotches of colour unite into large powerful forms. Bernatzik understands how to interpret with great subtlety twilight moods—moonshine struggling with the light of street lamps, or with the dawn. Ticky followed Henri Martin in painting solemn forest pictures. Ferdinand André leans towards the austere power of Millet. He tells us in his work of labour in the fields, of bronzed faces and hands callous with toil; and especially must his charcoal drawings be mentioned, in which the colour overlays the forms like light vapour, and which, small as they are, have a sculptural effect. Auchentelier—known for his female studies—and Hänisch and Otto Friedrich (b. 1862), refined and subtle as landscape painters, must also be mentioned.
In rivalry with the Secession, the “Künstlergenossenschaft” has taken a fresh upward flight. Among figure painters, Delug, Goltz (b. 1857), Hirschl and Veith are conspicuous; but still greater fascination is exercised by landscape painters such as Amesadan, Charlcmont, &c., whose works show Austrian art in its most amiable aspect. Apart from Austrians proper, there are also representatives of the other nationalities which compose “the monarchy of many tongues.” Bohemia takes the lead with a celebrity of European reputation—Gabriel Max (b. 1840), who, although of Piloty’s school and residing in Munich, never repudiated his Bohemian origin. The days of his youth were passed in Prague; and Prague, the medieval, with its narrow winding alleys, is the most mysterious of all Austrian cities, enveloped in the breath of old memories and bygone legends. From this soil Max drew the mysterious fragrance that characterizes his pictures. His earliest work, the “Female Martyr on the Cross” (1867), struck that sweetly painful, half-tormenting, half-enchanting keynote that has since remained distinctively his. Commonplace historical painting received at Max’s hands an entirely new nuance. The morbidness of the mortuary and the lunatic asylum, interspersed with spectres—something perverse, unnatural and heartrending—this is the true note of his art. His martyrs are never men—only delicate girls and helpless women. His colouring corresponds to his subjects. The sensations his pictures produce are akin to those which the sight of a beautiful girl lying in a mortuary, or the prison scene in Faust enacted in real life, might be expected to excite. He even applies the results of hypnotism and spiritualism to Biblical characters. In many of his pictures refinement in the selection of effects is missing. By over-production Max has himself vulgarized his art. Yet, despite his manner of depicting the mysteries of the realms of shadows, and the intrusion of the spirit-world into realism, he remains a modern master. A new province—the spectral—was opened up by him to art.
Hans Schwaiger is the real raconteur of Bohemian legends. He, likewise, passed his youth in a small Bohemian village, over which old memories still brooded. In Hradec, places upon which the gallows had stood were still pointed out. The lonely corridors and passages of the ruined castle were haunted by the shades of its old possessors. This is the mood that led Schwaiger to legend-painting. But underlying his fairy tales there are the gallows or the alchemy of Faust. The landscape with its gloomy skies, the wooden huts, turrets, dwarfed trees—such are ever the accompaniments of his figures.
Of the younger generation of painters, Emil Orlick (b. 1870) seems to be the most versatile. Having acquired technique in Paris and Munich, he practically discovered Old Prague to the world of art. The dark little alleys of the ancient town, swarming with life compressed within their narrow compass, fascinated him. In order to retain and convey all the impressions that crowded in upon him in such superabundant plenitude, he learned how to use the knife of the wood-carver, the needle of the etcher, and the pencil of the lithographer. His studio more resembles the workshop of a printer than the atelier of a painter. In the field of lithography he has attained remarkable results. Orlick has also made his own everything that can be learned from the Japanese. Besides these masters, Albert Hynais, the creator of decorative pictures almost Parisian in conception, must be mentioned. The landscape painters Wickener, Jansa, Slavicek, and Hudecek relate, in gentle melancholy tones of colour, the atmosphere and solitude of the wide plains of Bohemia.
In Poland, painting has its home at Cracow. Down to the year 1893 Johann Matejko was living there, in the capacity ​ of director of the Academy. His pictures are remarkable for their originality and almost brutal force, and differ very widely from the conventional productions of historical painters. At the close of the 19th century Axentowicz, Olga Hojnanska, Mehoffer, Stanislawski and Wyotkowski attracted attention. Although apparently laying much less stress on their Polish nationality than their Russian countrymen, their works proclaim the soul of the Polish nation, with its chivalrous gallantry and mute resigned grief, in a much purer form.
Hungary in the spring of 1899 lost him whom it revered as the greatest of its painters—Michael Munkacsy. Long before his death his brush had become idle. To the younger generation, which seeks different aims, his name has become almost synonymous with a wrongly-conceived old-masterly coloration, and with sensation painting and hollowness. “The Last Day of the Condemned Prisoner,” his first youthful picture, contained the programme of his art. Then came “The Last Moments of Mozart,” and “Milton dictating Paradise Lost.” These titles summon up before our eyes a period of all that is false in eclectic art, dominated by Delaroche and Piloty. Even the simple subjects of the Gospel were treated by Munkacsy in Piloty’s meretricious style. “Christ before Pilate,” “Ecce Homo,” “The Crucifixion”—all these are gala representations, costume get-up, and, to that extent, a pious lie. But when we condemn the faults of his period, his personal merit must not be forgotten. When he first came to the fore, ostentation of feeling was the fashion. Munkacsy is, in this respect, the genuine son of the period. He was not one of those who are strong enough to swim against the stream. Instead of raising others to his level, he descended to theirs. But he has the merit of having painted spectacular scenes, such as the period demanded, with genuine artistic power. Like Rahl, Ribot, Roybet and Makart, he was a maître-peintre, a born genius with the brush. Von Uhde and Liebermann were disciples of his school. And if these two painters have left that period behind them, and if independent natural sight has followed upon the imitation of the old masters, it is Munkacsy who enabled them to take the leap. (R. Mr.)
Italy
Modern Italy has produced one artist who towers over all the others, Giovanni Segantini (q.v.). Segantini owes as little to his period of study in Milan as Millet did to his sojourn at Delaroche’s school. Both derived from their teachers a complete mastery of technique, and as soon as they were in possession of all the aids to art, they discarded them in order to begin afresh. Each painted what he had painted as a youth. They dwelt far from the busy world—Millet in Barbizon, Segantini at Val d’ Albola, 5000 feet above the sea-level. They are equally closely allied in art. Millet, who rejected all the artifice of embellishment and perceived only beauty in things as they are, learned to see in the human body a heroic grandeur, in the movements of peasants a majestic rhythm, which none before him had discovered. Although representing peasants, his works resemble sacred pictures, so grand are they in their sublime solemn simplicity. The same is true of Segantini’s works. Like Millet, he found his vocation in observing the life of poor, humble people, and the rough grandeur of nature, at all seasons and all hours. As there is in Millet’s, so also is there in Segantini’s work a primitive, almost classical, simplicity of execution corresponding to the simplicity of the subjects treated. His pictures, with their cold silvery colouring, remind us of the wax-painting of old times and of the mosaic style of the middle ages. They are made up of small scintillating strokes; they are stony and look hard like steel. This technique alone, which touches in principle but not in effect, that of the pointillistes, permitted of his rendering what he wished to render, the stony crags of Alpine scenery, the thin scintillating air, the firm steel-like outlines. Finally, he passed from realistic subjects to thoughtful. Biblical and symbolical works. His “Annunciation,” the “Divine Youth,” and the “Massacre of the Innocents” were products of an art that had abandoned the firm ground of naturalism and aimed at conquering supernatural worlds. This new aim he was unable to realize. He left the “Panorama of the Engadine,” intended for the Paris Exhibition, in an unfinished state behind him. He died in his 42nd year, his head full of plans for the future. Modern Italy lost in him its greatest artist, and the history of art one of the rare geniuses.
Few words will suffice for the other Italian painters. The soil that had yielded down to Tiepolo’s days such an abundant harvest was apparently in need of rest during the 19th century. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867 About called Italy “the tomb of art,” and indeed until quite recent times Italian painting has had the character of mere pretty saleable goods. Francesco Vinea, Tito Conti, and Federigo Andreotti painted with tireless activity sleek drapery pictures, with Renaissance lords and smiling Renaissance ladies in them. Apart from such subjects, the comic, genre or anecdote ruled the fashion—somewhat coarse in colour and of a merrier tendency than is suitable for pictures of good taste. It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that there was an increase in the number of painters who aim at real achievement. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900 only Detti’s “Chest” and Signorini’s “Cardinal” pictures reminded one of the comedy subjects formerly in vogue. The younger masters employ neither “drapery-mummeries” nor spicy anecdote. They paint the Italian country people with refined artistic discernment, though scarcely with the naturalism of northern nations. Apparently the calm, serious, ascetic, austere art initiated by Millet is foreign to the nature of this volatile, colour-loving people. Southern fire and delight in brilliant hues are especially characteristic of the Neapolitans. A tangle of baldacchinos, priests and choir boys, peasants making obeisance and kneeling during the passing of the Host, weddings, horse-races and country festivals, everything sparkling with colour and glowing in Neapolitan sunlight—such are the contents of Paolo Michetti’s, Vincenzo Capri’s, and Edoardo Dalbono’s pictures. But Michetti, from being an adherent of this glittering art, has found his way to the monumental style. The Venetians acknowledge and honour as their leader Giacomo Favretto, who died very young. He painted drapery pictures, like most artists of the ’eighties, but they were never lackadaisical, never commonplace. The Venice of Canaletto and Goldoni, the magic city surrounded by the glamour of bygone splendour, rose again under Favretto’s hands to fairylike radiance.
The older masters, Signorini, Tito Tommasi, Dall ’oca Branca, who depict the Piedmontese landscape, the light on the lagoons, and the colour charm of Venetian streets with so refined a touch, have numerous followers, whose pictures likewise testify to the seriousness that again took possession of Italian painters after a long period of purely commercial artistic industry. Side by side with these native Italians two others must be mentioned, who occupy an important place as interpreters of Parisian elegance and French art-history. Giuseppe de Nittis (born in Naples; died in Paris 1884) was principally known by his representations of French street life. The figures that enlivened his pictures were as full of charm as his rendering of atmospheric effects was refined. Giovanni Boldini, a Ferrarese living in Paris, also painted street scenes, full of throbbing life. But he excelled, besides, as a portrait-painter of ladies and children. He realized the aim of the Parisian Impressionists, which was to render life, and not merely mute repose. He understood in a masterly fashion how to catch the rapid movement of the head, the fleetest expression, the sparkling of the eye, a pretty gesture. From his pictures posterity will learn as much about the sensuous life of the 19th century as Greuze has told us about that of the 18th.
Among those who have been the leaders of modern Italian art, not already mentioned, are Domenico Morelli, Giovanni Costa, landscape painter; Sartorio, an Italian Pre-Raphaelite; Pasini, painter of the East; Muzzioli, a follower of Alma-Tadema; Barabino, historical painter; and most striking and original of all, Monticelli, whose glow of colours was often ​ obtained, not only by palette-knife painting, but by squeezing the colour straight from the tubes on to the canvas.
See Ashton R. Willard, History of Modern Italian Art (London, 1898). (R. Mr.)
Spain and Portugal
Modern Spanish painting began with Mariano Fortuny (q.v.), who, dying as long ago as 1874, nevertheless left his mark even on the following generation of artists. During his residence in Paris in 1866 he had been strongly influenced by Meissonier, and subsequently selected similar subjects—scenes in 18th-century costume. In Fortuny, however, the French painter’s elaborate finish is associated with something more intense and vivid, indicative of the southern Latin temperament. He collected in his studio in Rome the most artistic examples of medieval industry. The objects among which he lived he also painted with incisive spirit as a setting for elegant figures from the world of Watteau and of Goya, which are thrown into his pictures with amazing dash and sparkle; and this love of dazzling kaleidoscopic variety has animated his successors. Academic teaching tries to encourage historical painting. Hence, since the ’seventies, the chief paintings produced in Spain have been huge historical works, which have made the round of European exhibitions and then been collected in the Gallery of Modern Art at Madrid. There may be seen “The Mad Queen Juana,” by Pradilla; “The Conversion of the Duke of Gandia,” by Moreno Carbonero; “The Bell of Huesca,” by Casado; “The Last Day of Numantia,” by Vera; “Ines de Castro,” by Cabello.
It is possible, of course, to discern in the love of the horrible displayed in these pictures an element of the national character, for in the land of bull-fights even painting turns to murder and sudden death, poison and the rope. However, at least we must admit the great power revealed, and recognize the audacious colouring. But in point of fact these works are only variants on those executed in France from the time of Delaroche to Jean Paul Laurens, and tell their story in the style that was current in Parisian studios in the ’sixties. What is called the national garb of Spain is mainly the cast-off fashion of Paris. After all this magniloquent work Fortuny’s rococo became the rage. The same painters who had produced the great historical pictures were now content to take up a brilliant and dazzling miniature style; either, like Fortuny himself, using small and motley figures in baroque subjects, or adapting the modern national life of Spain to the rococo style.
Here again we observe the acrobatic dexterity with which the painters, Pradilla especially, use the brush. But here again there is nothing essentially new—only a repetition of what Fortuny had already done twenty years before. The Spanish school, therefore, presented a very old-fashioned aspect at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. The pictures shown there were mostly wild or emotional. Bedouins fighting, an antique quadriga flying past, the inhabitants of Pompeii hastily endeavouring to escape from the lava torrent, Don Quixote’s Rosinante hanging to the sail of the windmill, and the terrors of the Day of Judgment were the subjects; Alvarez Dumont, Benlliure y Gil, Ulpiano Checa, Manuel Ramirez Ibañez and Moreno Carbonero were the painters. Among the huge canvases, a number of small pictures, things of no importance, were scattered, which showed only a genre-like wit. Spain is a somewhat barren land in modern art. There painting, although active, is blind to life and to the treasures of art which lie unheeded in the road. Only one artist, Agrasot, during the ’seventies painted pictures of Spanish low life of great sincerity; and much later two young painters appeared who energetically threw themselves into the modern movement. One was Sorolla y Bastida, by whom there is a large fishing picture in the Luxembourg, which in its stern gravity might be the work of a Northern painter; the other was Ignacio Zuloaga, in whom Goya seems to live again. Old women, girls of the people, and cocottes especially, he has painted with admirable spirit and with breadth. Spain, which has taken so little part in the great movement since Manet’s time, only repeating in old-fashioned guise things which are falsely regarded as national, seems at last to possess in Zuloaga an artist at once modern and genuinely national.
Portugal took an almost lower place in the Paris Exhibition. For whereas the historical Spanish school has endeavoured to be modern to some extent, at least in colour, the Portuguese cling to the blue-plush and red-velvet splendours of Delaroche in all their crudity. Weak pictures of monks and of visions are produced in numbers, together with genre pictures depicting the popular life of Portugal, spiced to the taste of the tourist. There are the younger men who aim at availing themselves of the efforts of the open-air painters; but even as followers of the Parisians they only say now what the French were saying long years ago through Bastien-Lepage, Puvis de Chavannes and Adrien Dumont. There is always a Frenchman behind the Portuguese, who guides his brush and sets his model. The only painter formed in the school is Carlos Reis, whose vast canvas “Sunset” has much in common with the first huge peasant pictures painted in Germany by Count Kalckreuth. One painter there is, however, who is quite independent and wholly Portuguese, a worthy successor of the great old masters of his native land, and this is Columbano, whose portraits of actors have a spark of the genius which inspired the works of Velazquez and Goya.
See A. G. Temple, Modern Spanish Painting (1908). (R. Mr.)
Denmark
Denmark resembles Holland in this: that in both, nature presents little luxury of emphasized colour or accentuated majesty of form. Broad flats are everywhere to be seen—vague, almost indefinable, in outline. Danish art is as demure and staid as the Danish landscape. As in Holland, the painters make no bold experiments, attempt no pretentious subjects, no rich colouring, nothing sportive or light. Like the Dutch, the Danes are somewhat sluggishly tranquil, loving dim twilight and the swirling mist. But Denmark is a leaner land than Holland, less moist and more thinly inhabited, so that its art lacks the comfortable self-satisfied character of Dutch art. It betrays rather a tremulous longing, a pleasing melancholy and delight in dreams, a trembling dread of contact with coarse and stern reality. It was only for a time, early in the ’seventies, that a touch of cosmopolitanism affected Danish art. The phase of grandiose historical painting and anecdotic genre was experienced there, as in every other country. In Karl Bloch (b. 1834), Denmark had a historical painter in some respects parallel with the German Piloty; in Axel Helsted (b. 1847), a genre painter reminding us of Ludwig Knaus. The two artists Laurits Tuxen (b. 1853) and Peter Kröyer (b. 1851), who are most nearly allied to Manet and Bastien-Lepage, have a sort of elegance that is almost Parisian. Kröyer, especially, has bold inventiveness and amazing skill. Open-air effects and twilight moods, the glare of sunshine and artificial light, he has painted with equal mastery. In portraiture, too, he stands alone. The two large pictures in which he recorded a “Meeting of the Committee of the Copenhagen Exhibition, 1887,” and a “Meeting of the Copenhagen Academy of Sciences,” are modern works which in power of expression may almost compare with those of Frans Hals. Such versatility and facile elegance are to be found in no other Danish painter. At the period of historic painting it was significant that next to Bloch, the cosmopolitan, came Kristian Zahrtmann (b. 1843), who painted scenes from the life of Eleonora Christina, a Danish heroine (daughter of Christian IV.), with the utmost simplicity, and without any emotional or theatrical pathos. This touching feeling for home and country is the keynote of Danish art. The Dane has now no sentiment but that of home; his country, once so powerful, has become but a small one, and has lost its political importance. Hence he clings to the little that is left to him with melancholy tenderness. Viggo Johansen (b. 1851), with his gentle dreaminess, is the best representative of modern Danish home-life. He shows us dark sitting-rooms, where a quiet party has met around the tea-table. “An Evening at Home,” “The Christmas Tree,” “Grandmother’s Birthday,” are typical subjects, and all have the same fresh and fragrant ​ charm. He is also one of the best Danish landscape painters. The silvery atmosphere and sad, mysterious stillness of the island-realm rest on Johansen’s pictures. Not less satisfactory in their little world are the rest: Holsöe (b. 1866), Lauritz Ring (b. 1854), Haslund, Syberg (b. 1862), Irminger (b. 1850), and listed paint the pleasant life of Copenhagen. In Skagen, a fishing town at the extreme end of Jutland, we find painters of sea life: Michael Ancher (b. 1849), Anna Ancher (b. 1859), and C. Locher (b. 1851). The landscape painters Viggo Pederson (b. 1854), Philipsen (b. 1840), Julius Paulsen (b. 1860), Johan Rohde (b. 1856) have made their home in the villages round Copenhagen. Each has his own individuality and sees nature with his own eyes, and yet in all we find the same sober tone, the same gentle, tearful melancholy. The new Idealism has, however, been discernible in Denmark. Joakim Skovgaard (b. 1856), with his “Christ among the Dead” and “Pool of Bethesda,” is trying to endow Denmark with a monumental type of art. Harald Slott-Möller (b. 1864) and J. F. Willumsen (b. 1863) affect a highly symbolical style. But even more than these painters, who aim at reproducing ancient folk-tales through the medium of modern mysticism, two others claim our attention, by the infusion into the old tradition of a very modern view of beauty approaching that of Whistler and of Carrière: one is Ejnar Nielsen, whose portraits have a peculiar, refined strain of gentle Danish melancholy; the other, V. Hammershöj, who has an exquisite sense of tone, and paints the magical effect of light in half-darkened rooms. Among the more noteworthy portrait painters, Aug. Jerndorff and Otto Bache should be included; and among the more decorative artists, L. Frölich; while Hans Tegner may be considered the greatest illustrator of his day. (R. Mr.)
Sweden
There is as great a difference between Danish and Swedish art as between Copenhagen and Stockholm. Copenhagen is a homely provincial town and life is confined to home circles. In Stockholm we find the whirl of life and all the elegance of a capital. It has been styled the Paris of the North, and its art also wears this cosmopolitan aspect. Düsseldorf, where in the ’sixties most painters studied their art, appeared to latter-day artists too provincial. Munich and, to a still greater extent, Paris became their “Alma Mater,” Salmson (1843–1894) and Hagborg (b. 1852), who were first initiated into naturalism in Paris, adopted this city for a domicile. They paint the fishermen of Brittany and the peasants of Picardy; and even when apparently interpreting Sweden, they only clothe their Parisian models in a Swedish garb. Those who returned to Stockholm turned their Parisian art into a Swedish art, but they have remained cosmopolitan until this day. Whilst there is something prosy and homely about Danish art, that of Sweden displays nervous elegance and cosmopolitan polish. Simplicity is in her eyes humdrum; she prefers light and brilliant notes. There, a naturalness and simplicity allows us to forget the difficulties of the brush: here, we chiefly receive the impression of a cleverly solved problem. There, the greatest moderation in colour, a soft all-pervading grey: here, a cunning play with delicate tones and gradations—a striving to render the most difficult effects of light with obedient hand. This tendency is particularly marked in the case of the landscape painters: Per Ekstróm (b. 1844), Niels Kreuger (b. 1858), Karl Nordstróm (b. 1865), Prince Eugen of Sweden (b. 1855), Axel Sjóberg Wallander (b. 1862), and Wahlberg (b. 1864). Nature in Sweden has not the idyllic softness, the veiled elegiac character, it displays in Denmark. It is more coquettish, southern and French, and the painters regard it also with French eyes.
As a painter of animals, Bruno Liljefors (b. 1860) created a sensation by his surprising pictures. Whatever his subjects—quails, capercailzies, dogs, hares, magpies or thrushes—he has caught the fleetest motions and the most transitory effects of light with the cleverness of a Japanese. With this exception, the Swedish painters cannot be classified according to “subjects.” They are “virtuosi,” calling every technical aspect of art their own—as well in fresco as in portrait painting. Oscar Bjórek (b. 1860), Ernst Josephson (b. 1851), Georg Pauli (b. 1855), Richard Bergh (b. 1858), Hanna Hirsch now Pauli (b. 1864) are the best-known names. Carl Larsson’s (b. 1853) decorative panneaux fascinate by their easy lightness and coquettish grace of execution. Ander Zorn (b. 1860), with his dazzling virtuosity, is as typical of Swedish as the prosaic simplicity of Johansen is of Danish art. His marine pictures, with their undulating waves and naked forms bathed in light, belong to the most surprising examples of the cleverness with which modern art can stereotype quivering motions; and the same boldness in handling his subjects, which triumphs over difficulties, makes his “interiors,” his portraits and etchings, objects of admiration to every painter’s eye. In his “Dance before the Window” all is vivacity and motion. His portrait of a “Peasant Woman” is a powerful harmony of sparkling yellow-red tones of colour. Besides these older masters who cleave to the most dazzling light effects, there are the younger artists of the school of Carl Larsson, who aspire more to decorative effects on a grander scale. Gustav Fjälstad (b. 1868) exhibited a picture in the Paris Exhibition of 1900 that stood out like mosaic among its surroundings. And great similarity in method has Hermann Normann, who, as a landscape painter, also imitates the classic style. (R. Mr.)
Norway
We enter a new world when in picture-galleries we pass to the Norwegian from the Swedish section. From the great city we are transported to nature, solemn and solitary, into a land of silence, where a rude, sparse population, a race of fishermen, snatches a scanty sustenance from the sea. The Norwegians also contributed for a time to the international market in works of art. They sent mainly genre pictures telling of the manners and customs of their country, or landscapes depicting the phenomena of Northern scenery. Adolf Tidemand (1814–1876) introduced his countrymen—the peasants and fishermen of the Northern coast—to the European public. We are introduced to Norwegian Christmas customs, accompany the Norseman on his nocturnal fishing expeditions, join the “Brudefaerd” across the Hardanger fjord, sit as disciples at the feet of the Norwegian sacristan. Ferdinand Fagerlin (b. 1825) and Hans Dahl are two other painters who, educated at Düsseldorf and settled in Germany, introduced the style of Knaus and Vautier to Norwegian art circles. Knud Badde (1808–1879), Hans Gude (b. 1825), Niels Bjórnsen Möller, Morten-Müller (b. 1828), Ludvig Munthe (1843–1896), and Adelsten Normann (b. 1848) are known as excellent landscape painters, who have faithfully portrayed the majestic mountain scenery and black pine forests of their native land, the cliffs that enclose the fjords, and the sparkling snowfields of the land of the midnight sun. But the time when actuality had to be well seasoned, and every picture was bound to have a spice of genre or the attraction of something out of the common to make it palatable, is past and gone. As early as the ’sixties Björnson was president of a Norwegian society which made it its chief business to wage war against the shallow conventionalities of the Düsseldorf school. Ibsen was vice-president. In the works of the more modern artists there is not a single trace of Düsseldorf influence. Especially in the ’eighties, when naturalism was at its zenith, we find the Norwegians its boldest devotees. They portrayed life as they found it, without embellishment; they did not trouble about plastic elegance, but painted the land of their home and its people in a direct, rough-hewn style. Like the people we meet in the North, giants with stalwart iron frames, callous hands, and sunburnt faces, with their sou’-westers and blue blouses, who resemble sons of a bygone heroic age, have the painters themselves—notably Niels Gustav Wentzel (b. 1859), Svend Jórgensen (b. 1861), Kolstoe (b. 1860). Christian Krohg—something primitive in the directness, in, one might almost say, the barbarous brutality with which they approach their subjects. They preferred the most glaring effects of plein-air; they revelled in all the hues of the rainbow.
But these very uncouth fellows, who treated the figures in their pictures with such rough directness, painted even in those ​ days landscapes with great refinement; not the midnight sun and the precipitous cliffs of the fjords, by which foreigners were sought to be impressed, but austere, simple nature, as it lies in deathlike and spectral repose—lonely meres, whose surface is unruffled by the keel of any boat, where no human being is visible, where no sound is audible; the hour of twilight, when the sun has disappeared behind the mountains, and all is chill and drear; the winter, when an icy blast sweeps over the crisp snowfields; the spring, almost like winter, with its bare branches and its thin young shoots. Such were their themes, and painters like Amaldus Nilsen (b. 1838), Eilif Petersen (b. 1852), Christian Skredsvig (b. 1854), Fritz Thaulow (b. 1848), and Gerhard Munthe (b. 1849) arrested public attention by their exhibition of pictures of this character.
Latterly these painters have become more civilized, and have emancipated themselves from their early uncouthness. Jörgensen, Krohg, Kolstoe, Soot, Gustav Wentzel, no longer paint those herculean sailors and fishermen, those pictures of giants that formerly gave to Norwegian exhibitions their peculiar character. Elegance has taken possession of the Norwegian palette. This transformation began with Fritz Thaulow, and indeed his art threatened to relapse somewhat into routine, and even the ripples of his waters to sparkle somewhat coquettishly. Borgen (b. 1852), Hennig (b. 1871), Hjerlów (b. 1863), and Stenersen (b. 1862) were gifted recruits of the ranks of Norwegian painters, whilst Halfdan Strom (b. 1863), who depicts rays of light issuing from silent windows and streaming and quivering over solitary landscapes, dark blue streams and ponds, nocturnal skies, variegated female dresses, contrasting as spots of colour with dark green meadows, has a delicacy in colouring that recalls Cazin. Gerhard Munthe, who, as we have seen, first made a name by his delicate vernal scenery, has turned his attention to the classical side of art; and, finally Erik Werenskjold (b. 1855), who was also first known by his landscapes and scenes of country life, afterwards gained success as an illustrator of Norwegian folk-lore. (R. Mr.)
Russia
Until late in the 19th century modern Russian painting was unknown to western Europe. What had been seen of it in international exhibitions showed the traditions of primitive European art, with a distinct vein of barbarism. In the early ’fifties, painters were less bent on art than on political agitation; they used the brush as a means of propaganda in favour of some political idea. Peroff showed us the miserable condition of the serfs, the wastefulness and profligacy of the nobility. Vereschagin made himself the advocate of the soldier, painting the horrors of war long before the tsar’s manifesto preached universal disarmament. Art suffered from this praiseworthy misapplication; many pictures were painted, but very few rose to the level of modern achievement in point of technique. It was only by the St Petersburg art journal Mir Iskustwa, and by a small exhibition arranged at Munich in 1892 by a group of Russian landscape painters, that it was realized that a younger Russian school had arisen, fully equipped with the methods of modern technique, and depicting Russian life with the stamp of individuality. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900 the productions of this young Russian school were seen with surprise. A florescence similar to that which literature displayed in Pushkin, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy seemed to be beginning for Russian painting. Some of these young painters rushed into art with unbridled zest, painting with primitive force and boldness. They produced historical pictures, almost barbaric but of striking force; representations of the life of the people full of deep and hopeless gloom; the poor driven by the police and huddled together in dull indifference; the popes tramping across the lonely steppes, prayer-book in hand; peasants muttering prayers before a crucifix. There is great pathos in “The Karamasow Brothers,” or “The Power of Darkness.” At the same time we feel that a long-inherited tradition pervades all Russia. We find a characteristic ecclesiastical art, far removed from the productions of the fin de siècle, in which the rigid tradition of the Byzantines of the 3rd century still survives. And, finally, there are landscapes almost Danish in their bloodless, dreamy tenderness. Among the historical painters Elias Repin is the most impressive. In his pictures, “Ivan the Cruel,” “The Cossacks’ Reply to the Sultan,” and “The Miracle of Saint Nicholas,” may be seen—what is so rare in historical painting—genuine purpose and style. Terror is rendered with Shakespearean power; the boldness with which he has reconstituted the past, and the power of pictorial psychology which has enabled him to give new life to his figures, are equally striking in “Sowing on the Volga” and “The Village Procession.” He was the first to paint subjects of contemporary life, and the work, while thoroughly Russian, has high technical qualities—the sense of oppression, subjection and gloom is all-pervading. But he does not “point the moral,” as Peroff did; he paints simply but sympathetically what he sees, and this lends his pictures something of the resigned melancholy of Russian songs. Even more impressive than Repin is Philippe Maliavine. He had rendered peasants, stalwart figures of powerful build; and, in a picture called “Laughter,” Macbeth-like women, wrapped in rags of fiery red, are thrown on the canvas with astonishing power. Among religious painters Victor Vasnezov, the powerful decorator of the dome in the church of St Vladimir at Kiev, is the most distinguished figure. These paintings seem to have been executed in the very spirit of the Russian church; blazing with gold, they depend for much of their effect upon barbaric splendour. But Vasnezov has painted other things: “The Scythians,” fighting with lance and battle-axe; horsemen making their way across the pathless steppe; and woods and landscapes pervaded by romantic charm, the home of the spirits of Russian legend. Next to Vasnezov is Michael Nesterov, a painter also of monks and saints, but as different from him as Zurbaran from the mosaic workers of Venice; and Valentin Serov, powerful in portraiture and fascinating in his landscape. It is to be remarked that although these artists are austere and unpolished in their figure-painting, they paint landscape with delicate refinement.
Schischkin and Vassiliev were the first to paint their native land in all simplicity, and it is in landscape that Russian art at the present time still shows its most pleasing work. Savrassov depicts tender spring effects; Kuindshi light birch-copses full of quivering light; Sudkovski interprets the solemn majesty of the sea; Albert Benois paints in water-colour delicate Finnish scenery; Apollinaris Vasnezov has recorded the dismal wastes of Siberia, its dark plains and endless primeval forest, with powerful simplicity.
A special province in Russian art must be assigned to the Poles. It is difficult indeed to share to the full the admiration felt in Warsaw for the Polish painters. It is there firmly believed that Poland has a school of its own, owing nothing to Russia, Austria or Germany; an art which embodies all the chivalry and all the suffering of that land. The accessories are Polish, and so are the costumes. Jan Chelminski, Wojcliech Gerson, Constantine Gorski, Apolonius Kendzrierski, Joseph Ryszkievicz and Roman Szvoinicki are the principal artists. We see in their pictures a great deal of fighting, a great deal of weeping; but what there is peculiar to the Poles in the expression or technique of their works it is hard to discover.
Finland, on the other hand, is thoroughly modern. Belonging by descent to Sweden rather than to Russia, its painters’ views of art also resemble those of the “Parisians of the North.” They display no ungoverned power, but rather supple elegance. The play of light and the caprice of sunshine are rendered with much subtlety. Albert Edelfeldt is the most versatile artist of the group; Axel Gallen, at first naturalistic, developed into a decorative artist of fine style; Eero Jaernefelt charms with his airy studies and brilliant landscapes. Magnus Enckell, Pekka Halonen and Victor Vesterholm sustain the school with work remarkable for sober and tasteful feeling. (R. Mr.)
Balkan States
Until quite recent times the Balkan States had no part at all in the history of art. But at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 it was noted with surprise that even in south-eastern Europe ​ there was a certain pulsation of new life. And there were also signs that painting in the Balkans, which hitherto had appeared only as a reflex of Paris and Munich art, would ere long assume a definite national character. At this Exhibition Bulgaria seemed to be the most backward of all, its painters still representing the manners and customs of their country in the style of the illustrated papers. Market-places are seen, where women with golden chains, half-nude boys and old Jews are moving about; or cemeteries, with orthodox clergy praying and women sobbing; military pageants, wine harvests and horse fairs, old men performing the national dance, and topers jesting with brown-eyed girls. Such are the subjects that Anton Mittoff, Raymund Ulrich and Jaroslav Vesin paint. More original is Mvkuicka. In his most important work he represented the late princess of Bulgaria sitting on a throne, solemn and stately, in the background mosaics rich in gild, tall slim lilies at her side. In his other pictures he painted Biblical landscapes, battlefields wrapped in sulphurous smoke, and old Rabbis—all with a certain uncouth barbaric power. The Bulgarian painters have not as yet arrived at the aesthetic phase. One of the best among them, who paints delicate pale green landscapes, is Charalampi Ilieff; and Nicholas Michailoff, at Munich, has executed pictures, representing nymphs, that arrest attention by their delicate tone and their beautiful colouring.
Quite modern was the effect of the small Croatian-Slavonic Gallery in the Exhibition. Looking at the pictures there, the visitor might imagine himself on the banks of the Seine rather than in the East. The French saying, “Faire des Whistler, faire des Dagnan, faire des Carrière,” is eminently applicable to their work. Vlaho Bukovak, Nicola Masic, Csiks and Medovic all paint very modern pictures, and in excellent taste, only it is surprising to find upon them Croatian and not Parisian signatures.
Precisely the same judgment must be passed with regard to Rumania. Most of the painters live in Paris or Munich, have sought their inspiration at the feet of the advanced masters there, and paint, as pupils of these masters, pictures just as good in taste, just as cosmopolitan and equally devoid of character. Irène Deschly, a pupil of Carrière, illustrates the songs of François Coppée; Verona Gargouromin is devoted to the pale symbolism of Dagnan-Bouveret. Nicolas Grant paints bright landscapes, with apple trees with their pink blossoms, like Darnoye. Nicolas Gropeano appears as the double of Aman-Jean, with his female heads and pictures from fairy tales. Olga Koruca studied under Puvis de Chavannes, and painted Cleopatra quite in the tone of her master. A landscape by A. Segall was the only work that appeared to be really Rumanian, representing thatched huts.
Servia is in striking contrast to Rumania. No trace of modern influence has penetrated to her. There historical painting, such as was in vogue in France and Germany a generation ago, is the order of the day. Risto Voucanovitch paints his scenes from Servian history in brown; Paul Ivanovitch his in greyish plein-air. But in spite of this paté painting, the latter’s works have no modern effect—as little as the sharply-drawn small landscapes of his brother Svatislav Ivanovitch. (R. Mr.)
United States
The history of painting in the United States practically began with the 19th century. The earlier years of the nation were devoted to establishing government, subduing the land and the aborigines, building a commonwealth out of primeval nature; and naturally enough the aesthetic things of life received not too much consideration. In Colonial times the graphic arts existed, to be sure, but in a feeble way. Painting was made up of portraits of prominent people; only an occasional artist was disposed towards historical pictures; but the total result added little to the sum of art or to the tale of history. The first artist of importance was J. S. Copley (1737–1815), with whom painting in America really began. Benjamin West (1738–1820) belongs in the same period, though he spent most of his life in England, and finally became President of the Royal Academy. As a painter he is not to be ranked so high as Copley. In the early part of the 19th century two men, John Trumbull (1756–1843), a historical painter of importance, and Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), a pre-eminent portrait painter, were the leaders; and after them came John Vanderlyn (1776–1852), Washington Allston (1779–1843), Rembrandt Peale (1787–1860), J. W. Jarvis (1780–1834), Thomas Sully (born in England, 1783–1872)—men of importance in their day. The style of all this early art was modelled upon that of the British school, and indeed most of the men had studied in England under the mastership of West, Lawrence and others. The middle or second period of painting in the United States began with the landscape work of Thomas Doughty (1793–1856) and Thomas Cole (1801–1848). It was not a refined or cultivated work, for the men were in great measure self-taught, but at least it was original and distinctly American. In subject and in spirit it was perhaps too panoramic and pompous; but in the hands of A. B. Durand (1796–1886), J. F. Kensett (1818–1872) and F. E. Church (1826–1900), it was modified in scale and improved in technique.
A group of painters called the Hudson River school finally emerged. To this school some of the strongest landscape painters in the United States owe their inspiration, though in almost every case there has been the modifying influence of foreign study. Contemporary with Cole came the portrait painters Chester Harding (1792–1866), C. L. Elliott (1812–1868), Henry Inman (1801–1846), William Page (1811–1885), G. P. A. Healy (1813–1894), Daniel Huntington and W. S. Mount (1807–1868), one of the earliest genre painters. Foreign art had been followed to good advantage by most of these painters, and as a result some excellent portraits were produced. The excellence of the work was not, however, appreciated by the public generally because art knowledge was not at that time a public possession. Little was required of the portrait painter beyond a recognizable likeness. A little later the teachings of the Düsseldorf school began to have an influence upon American art through Leutze (1816–1868), who was a German pupil of Lessing, and went to America to paint historical scenes from the War of Independence. But the foreign influence of the time to make the most impression came from France in 1855 with two American pupils of Couture—W. M. Hunt (1824–1879) and Thomas Hicks (1823–1890). Hunt had also been a pupil of Millet at Barbizon, and was the real introducer of the Barbizon painters to the American people. After his return to Boston his teaching and example had much weight in moulding artistic opinion. He, more than any other, turned the rising generation of painters towards the Paris schools. Contemporary with Hunt and following him were a number of painters, some self-taught and some schooled in Europe, who brought American art to a high standard of excellence. George Fuller (1822–1884), Eastman Johnson, Elihu Vedder, produced work of much merit; and John La Farge and Winslow Homer were unquestionably the foremost painters in the United States at the opening of the 20th century. In landscape the three strongest men have passed away—A. H. Wyant, George Inness, and Homer Martin. Swain Gifford, Edward Gay, Thomas Moran, Jervis McEntee, Albert Bierstadt, are other landscape painters of note who belonged to the middle period and reflected the traditions of the Hudson River school to some extent. With the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876 a widespread and momentous movement in American art began to shape itself. The display of pictures at Philadelphia, the national prosperity, and the sudden development of the wealth of the United States had doubtless much to do with it. Many young men from all parts of the country took up the study of art and began going abroad for instruction in the schools at Munich, and, later, at Paris. Before 1880 some of them had returned to the United States and founded schools and societies of art, like the Art Students’ League and the Society of American Artists. The movement spread to the Western cities, and in a few years museums and art schools began to appear in all the prominent towns, and a national interest in art was awakened. After 1870 the predominant influence, as regards technical training, was French. Many students still go to Paris to complete their studies, though there is a large body of accomplished painters teaching in the home schools, with satisfactory results as regards ​the work of their pupils. From their French training, many of the American artists have been charged with echoing Parisian art; and the charge is partly true. They have accepted French methods because they think them the best, but their subjects and motives are sufficiently original.
Under separate biographical headings a number of modern American artists are noticed. Some of the greatest Americans however can hardly be said to belong to any American school. James McNeill Whistler, though American-born, is an example of the modern man without a country. E. A. Abbey, John S. Sargent, Mark Fisher and J. J. Shannon are American only by birth. They became resident in London and must be regarded as cosmopolitan in their methods and themes. This may be said with equal truth of many painters resident in Paris and elsewhere on the Continent. However good as art it may be, there is nothing distinctively American about the work of W. T. Dannat, Alexander Harrison, George Hitchcock, Gari Melchers, C. S. Pearce, E. L. Weeks, J. L. Stewart and Walter Gay. If they owe allegiance to any centre or city, it is to Paris rather than to New York.
During the last quarter of the 19th century much effort and money were devoted to the establishment of institutions like the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburg, and the Art Institute in Chicago. Every city of importance in the United States now has its gallery of paintings. Schools of technical training and societies of artists likewise exist wherever there are important galleries. Exhibitions during the winter season and at great national expositions give abundant opportunity for rising talent to display itself; and, in addition, there has been a growing public patronage of painting, as shown by the extensive mural decorations in the Congressional Library building at Washington, in the Boston Public Library, in many colleges and churches, in courts of justice, in the reception-rooms of large hotels, in theatres and elsewhere.  (J. C. van D.)