memory and given the initial direction to his thinking about the portrait.

It has long been recognized that in the basic organiza-tion of the

picture Reynolds had Michelangelo's prophets and sybils of the Sistine

ceiling in mind. Mrs Siddons's pose'recalls that of Isaiah, and of the

two attendant figures the one on the left is very closely modelled on the

simi-larly placed companion of the prophet Jeremiah.

Reynolds's attitude toward this sort of borrowing from the works of

other artists may seem a little strange to us today. He thought that great

works of art should serve as a school to the students at the Royal

Academy: "He, who borrows an idea from an ancient, or even from a modern

artist not his contemporary, and so accommodates his own work, that it

makes a part of it, with no seam or joining appearing, can hardly be

charged with plagiarism: poets practise this kind of borrowing, without

reserve. But an artist should not be content with this only; he should

enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what

he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is ... a perpetual

exercise of the mind, a continual invention." From this point of view "The

Tragia Muse" is a perfect illustration of Reynolds;s advice to the

student.

If the arrangement of the figures in the portrait of Mrs Siddons

suggests Michelangelo, other aspects of the painting, particularly the

colour, the heavy shadow effects, and the actual application of the paint,

are totally unlike the work of Michelangelo and suggest instead the

paintings of Rembrandt.

But the amazing thing is that the finished product is in no sense a

pastiche. The disparate elements have all been transformed through

Reynolds's own visual imagination and have emerged as a unit in which the

relationship of all the parts to one another seems not only correct but

inevitable. This in itself is an achievement commanding our admiration.

In "The Tragic Muse" Reynolds achieved an air of grandeur and dignity

which he and his contemporaries regarded as a prime objective of art and

which no other portrait of the day embodied so successfully.

5.3) George Romney (1734-1802)

Romney is best known to the general public by facile portraits of

women and children and by his many studies of Lady Hamilton, whom he

delighted to portray in various historical roles, these are not however his

best works. His visit to Italy at a time when New Classical movement was

gaming ground made a lasting impression on him and some of his portrait

groups, e. g. "The Gower Children", 1776, are composed with classical

statuary in mind, particularly in the treatment of the draperies. He

painted a number of impressive male portraits., and some fashionable groups

of great elegance, e. g. "Sir Cristopher and Lady Sykes", 1786. His output

was large,,but he never exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Romney was of an imaginative, introspective, and nervous temperament.

He was attracted to literary circles and William Hayley and William Cowper

were among his friends. He had aspirations to literary subjects in the

Grand Manner, and, painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. His sepia

drawings, mostly designs for literary and historical subjects which he

never carried put, were highly prized; there is a large collection of them

in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

5.4) Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)

When Gainsborough made his often-quoted remark about Reynolds, "Damn

him, how various he is", he was glancing, we may suppose, at the peculiar

skill by which his great rival ran the whole gamut of portrait-painting,

from "mere heads" to the most elaborate poetic and allegorical fantasies.

Gainsborough himself had no such variety, but painted his sitters,

commonly, in their habit as they lived. Yet, in a larger sense, he was far

more va-rious than Reynolds. He excelled in two distinct branches of the

art, portraiture and landscape, and revealed an un-equalled success in

combining the two -- that is, in adjusting the human figure to a background

of natural scenery. Moreover, he excelled in conversation pieces, animal

painting, seascapes, genre and even still life. Such was his peculiar

variety.

Gainsborough's personality was also more vivid and various than that of Sir

Joshua. He was excitable, easily moved to wrath and as readily appeased,

generous and friendly with all who loved music and animals and the open

air. He had not Reynolds's gift of suffering fools gladly. Although he

painted at court, he was not a courtly person, but preferred to associate

with musicians, simple folk, and, on occasion, with cottagers. His most

engaging pictures are those of persons with whom he was intimate or at

ease. His grand sitters seem a little glacial, for all the perfection of

the painter's technique, as though a pane of glass were between them and

the artist.

The methods of the two painters are sufficiently indicated by their

respective treatment of Mrs Siddons. Reynolds, when the portrait was

finished, signed his name along the edge of her robe, in order to send his

name "down to posterity on the hem of her garment". Gainsborough made no

attempt, as he had no wish, to record the art of "Queen Sarah"; but he was

interested in the woman as she rustled into his studio in her blue and

white silk dress. Her hat, muff and fur delighted him, and he proceeded to

paint her as though she were paying him a call. As an actress, she was one

of those sitters with whom he could be informal; and while drawing her

striking profile, he is said to have remarked, "Damn it, madam, there is no

end to your nose." The man who made such a remark was, clearly, no

courtier, but a brusque and friendly being, concerned to rid his sitter of

all sense of restraint. For a painter's studio is to the sitter a nerve-

racking place.

Gainsborough had from the first shown peculiar skill in representing

his sitters as out-of-doors, and thus uniting portraiture with landscape.

In his youth he had painted a portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews sitting in a

wheat-fieM - a lovely picture, fresh as the dew of morning, in which

Gainsborough's two major interests seem almost equally balanced; and at the

close of his career his love of scenery sometimes prevailed over his

interest in human beings, and resulted not so much in a portrait as in a

picture of a garden or a park, animated by gallant men and gracious women.

The tendency to prefer the scenery to the persons animating it reaches a

climax in the famous canvas "Ladies Walking in the Mall". It is a view of

the central avenue of the Mall, near Gainsborough's residence, behind

Carlton House. The identity of the fashionable ladies taking an afternoon

stroll in the park is happily ignored. The rustling of the foliage is

echoed, as it were, in the shimmer of the ladies' gowns, so that Horace

Walpole wrote of the picture that it was "all-a-flutter, like a lady's

fan". It has the delicate grace of Lancret or Pater, and betrays the

painter's ingenious escape from his studio to the greenest retreat.

Joshua Reynolds

on the Art of Thomas Gainsborough

"Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes or fancy-pictures,

it is difficult to determine [...] This excel-lence was his own, the

result of his particular observation and taste; for this he was certainly

not indebted [...] to any School; for his grace was not academical, or

antique, but selected by himself from the great school of nature [...]

[...] The peculiarity of his manner or style, or we may call it - his

language in which he expressed his ideas, has been considered by many, as

his greatest defect. But... whether this peculiarity was a defect or not,

intermixed, as it was, with great beauties, of some of which it was

probably the cause, it becomes a proper subject of criticism and enquiry to

a painter. [...]

[...] It is certain, that all those odd scratches and marks which, on

a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures; ... this

chaos, this uncouth and shape-less appearance, by a kind of magic, at a

certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their

proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect

of diligence, under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence. [...]

[...] It must be allowed, that the hatching manner of Gainsborough

did very much contribute to the lightness of effect which is so eminent a

beauty in his pictures." [...]

6) Eighteenth Century Lanscape

By the time of Hogarth's death in 1764, a new genera-tion had already

established itself in London, with a new kind of art and a new attitude to

art. By 1750, a number of native-born artists were making very fair

.livings in branches other than the "safe" one of portrait-painting. There

were distinguished painters in landscape, sea-painting, and animal

painting, quite apart from Hogarth's innovation of satirical comic

painting. For Englishmen it may be true that landscape and animal painting,

and to an extent sea-painting, have always been best loved when they retain

something of portraiture - are portraits, in fact, recognizable likenesses

of their own parks, houses, or towns, of their cities, of their ships or

sea-battles.

The best landscapes painted in England at the closje of the

seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centu-ries were

topographical in nature. In marine painting the leading figure was Samuel

Scott (1702-1772), a contemporary of Hogarth, who began by painting in the

manner of Van de Veldes, but who later switched to townscape almost

certainly in answer to a demand that had been created by Canaletto. His

(Canaletto's) paintings were widely known here, brought back by young

Englishmen^as perfect souvenirs, before he himself came in 1746.

Scott, following close in Canaletto's footsteps in

his views of London, caught perhaps more of the veil of moisture that is

almost always in English skies. But Scott lacked the Venetian's

spaciousness and the logic of picture-making.

Richard Wilson (1714-1782) developed a stronger, more severe style, in

which the classic inspiration of the two French masters of the Italian

landscape, Claude and GaspardPoussin, is very clear; as also, rather later,

is that'of "the broad shimmering golden visions of the Dutchman, Cuyp.

Wilson's English work of the sixties and seventies, more various than

is often thought, is at its best of a calm, sunbasking, poetic distinction;

to the English landscape he transferred something of the miraculously lucid

Roman light, in which objects in the countryside can seem to group

themselves consciously into picture. On other occasions Wilson found in the

Welsh and in the English scene a ra-diant yet brooding tenderness, the

placid mystery of wide stretches of water, over which the eye is drawn deep

into the picture to the far Haze on the horizon where sight seems to melt.

Sometimes he also made a bid to align his compositions with the classic

example of Claude by peopling them with classic or mythological figures.

The most remarkable of Gainsborough's landscapes have, in fact, only

found a full appreciation this century. These are very early landscapes,

painted in Suffolk about 1750; strictly they are not pure landscapes as

they include portraits, but the synthesis of the two genres is so perfect

that the pictures become portraits of more than a person - of a whole way

of life, of a country gentry blooming modestly and naturally among their

woods and fields, their parks and lakes. The directness of

characterization is so

traightforward as to seem almost naive. The light on land and tree and

water has a rainwashed brilliance, and a strange tension of stillness -

sometimes it is almost a thunderlight.

In his later pure landscapes, the woodenness melts under the brush

of a painter who loved the radiant shimmering fluency of his medium as

perhaps no other English painter has ever done.

Wilson and Gainsborough form the two main peaks in eighteenth century

landscape painting.

Gainsborough's Landscapes

As a landscape painter Gainsborough was influenced in his early years

by Dutch seventeenth century pictures seen in East Anglia; and the

landscape backgrounds in his Ipswich period portraits are all in that

tradition. But during his Bath period he saw paintings by Rubens and

thereafter that influence is apparent in his landscape compositions. The

landscapes of Gainsborough's maturity have spontaneity deriving from the

light rapid movement of his brush;- but they are not rapid sketches from

nature, he never painted out-of-doors; he painted his landscapes in his

studio from his drawings, and from the scenes which , he constructed in a

kind of model theatre, where he took bits of cork and vegetables and so on

and moved them about, and moved the light about, till he had arranged a

composi-tion. It is possible that some of his preliminary black and white

chalk landscape drawings were done out-of-doors; but the majority were

done in the studio from memory when he returned from his walk or ride; and

some of the finest of the drawings, the "Horses by a Shed", for example,

resulted perhaps from a combination of the two procedures - a rough pencil

note made on the spot and reconsidered in terms of composition with the

aid of his candle and the model theatre after dinner. At his highest level

he went far beyond the current formulae and achieved a degree of

integrated three-dimensional arrangement.

Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers"

Probably the most lasting impression made on many people by Richard

Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers" is of the golden light that suffuses

the painting. It is a sort of light we associate with a warm summer

evening. Actual sunlight doesn't often have such a mellow tone, but this

colour accords perfectly with the image many of us hold of what evening

light ideally should be. Almost everything about this painting has a

similar elysian quality. None of us has seen a view exactly like this one,

and yet it immediately strikes a sympathetic chord: the cattle lazing in

the late sun while the herders take a swim; the softly rounded hills with

masses of unruffled foliage; the quiet river meandering toward the distant

mountain and the still more distant, unclouded horizon. There is even a

ruined temple, picturesquely placed as a gentle reminder of the transitory

character of man's achievement in the face of nature. Eve-rything about

this painting contributes to this idyllic mood. It is a little too good to

be true; but we wish it might be true.

Richard Wilson himself had never seen this view any more than we

have, because it does not exist. It was for him, as it is for us, an ideal

landscape, sensitively developed in his imagination from his recollections

of things encountered, both in nature and in art. It was an attitude that

was widely accepted in Wilson's day. The artistic climate that produced a

painting such as "River Scene with Bathers" is akin to that which accounts

for "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse".

Underlying the interest in creating an "ideal" landscape was the

assumption that art should aspire to something more than mere sensuous

gratification; that it should elevate the thoughts of the spectator and

purge his mind of petty considerations. This was to be achieved both by

what was included and (equally important) the way in which it was

represented. The scene, with its ruin, spacious vista, and warm summer

light, is meant to remind us of Italy, or at least the Mediterranean area,

and to arouse by association a train of thought concerned with pastoral

idylls of the classical past. But this effect is strongly supported by the

way in which Wilson has organized the elements in his painting to sustain a

mood of quiet and repose. The picture is carefully balanced around the

centrally placed ruin. The hill to the right finds just the proper counter-

poise in the distant mountain and the broad stretch of valley to the left.

The group of bathers on the left is balanced by the cattle on the right.

The whole view is enframed by trees on either side and set comfortably back

in space by a dark' foreground ledge. The sense of balance involves many

factors, including shape, light, texture and distance. Nothing appears

forced, but every element in the picture has been conceived and placed with

regard to its relation to the

whole.

7) SCIENCE AND ANIMAL PAINTING

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) and George Stubbs (1724-1806)

A most interesting figure was Joseph Wright of Derby, an able enough

painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was conventionally London-

trained in portraiture, and made the, by then, conventionally necessary

trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he returned in the

end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed,

practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn'of the Industrial

Revolution. He saw the world in a forced and sharpening light'- sometimes

artificial, the mill-windows brilliant in the night, faces caught in the

circle of the lamp, or the red glow of an iron forge, casting mon-strous

shadows. This was an old trick - deriving from Caravaggio and the Dutch

candlelight painters - but with it Wright brought out a sense of

exploration and exploitation - scientific, intellectual and commercial,

the spirit of the Midlands of his time. His patrons were men like the

industrialist Arkwright of the spinning Jenny, and Dr Priestley, the

poetic seer of the new science (both of whom he painted).

The "Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump", painted in 1768, is

perhaps his masterpiece. Air-pumps were in considerable production in the

Midlands at the time, but this is not merely an excellently painted and

composed study of scientific experiment. It is raised to the pitch of a

true and moving drama of life by the tender yet un-sentimental exploration

of a human situation. The bird in the globe will die, as the vacuum is

created in it; the elder girl on the right cannot bear the idea and hides

her face in her hands, while the younger one though half-turned away also,

looks up still to the bird with a marvellous and marvelling expression in

which curiosity is just overcoming fear and pity. The moon, on the edge of

cloud, seen through the window on the right, adds another dimension of

weird-ness and mystery.

This is a picture that exists on many levels but, as it was not

expressed in terms of the classical culture of the age, Wright's subject

pictures were for long not given their due. He himself stood apart from

that (classical) culture; although he early became an associate of the

Royal Academy, he soon quarrelled with it.

George Stubbs presents in some ways a similar case: he never became a

full member of the Royal Academy. He was, for his contemporaries, a mere

horse-painter. In the last few years he has been much studied, and his

reassess-ment has lifted him to the level of the greatest of his'time. His

life has been fairly described as heroic. The son of a Liverpool currier,

he supported himself at the begin-ning of his career" in northern England

by painting por-traits, but at the same time started on his study of

anatomy, animal and human, that was to prove not only vitally im-portant to

his art but also a new contribution to science. Stubbs was one of the

great English empiricists. He took a farm-house in Lincolnshire and in it,

over eighteen months, he grappled with the anatomy of the horse. His models

were the decaying carcasses of horses, which he gradually stripped down,

recording each revelation of anatoT my in precise and scientific drawing.

The result was his book The Anatomy of the Horse, a pioneering work both in

science and art.

All his painting is based on knowledge drawn from ruthless study,

ordered by a most precise observation. In the seventies, his scientific

interests widened from anatomy to chemistry, and helped by Wedgwood, the

enlightened founder of the great pottery firm, he experimented in enam) el

painting. His true and great originality was not on-conventional lines, and

could not be grasped by contemporary taste.

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