The main development of painting in the last century has been in the direction of landscape painting, and, as allied to it, of figures under the conditions of outdoor lighting—in the open air. We may go back to the Italian Primitives for the first landscape painters, although landscape was then only an accessory, and did not, as a rule, consist of more than a sky and a view of distant country, used as a background for figures. But these little glimpses of landscape, especially the skies, are most interesting and beautiful. I do not, indeed, think that skies have at any time been painted which give the feeling of light so beautifully, or a finer, purer sentiment in the landscape itself. There is a very fine instance in the large fresco by Perugino in the National Gallery—a picture representing the “Adoration of the Shepherds.” The figures are in a field, under a very light and delicate sky. The tender sentiment of the scene is much the same as we find in the pictures of Corot.

In the little “Crucifixion” by Antonello da Messina, also in the National Gallery, there is a landscape—the effect is that of dawn—with a sky of the most beautiful quality; and, among many others, there are two pictures by Ambrogio Bourgognone, a contemporary of Da Vinci’s, also in the National Gallery, which have, in their backgrounds, charming little glimpses of rivers and towns, painted very freely and sweetly, as one would like to see them painted to-day. And the picture of “Christ in the Garden,” by Bellini, shows a landscape splendid in the tragic sentiment of its colour, especially in the lurid sky. You know the picture; the effect is that of nightfall. And there is also, in the background of a picture of a Magdalen by Savoldo, a beautiful little nightpiece, with water, boats, and sky of a deep and beautiful blue. I should imagine it is one of the first “nocturnes.”

One of the first men to treat landscape as the principal element in a picture was a contemporary of Dürer’s, named Patinir. There are some of his pictures in the National Gallery; one, of a winding river between mountains, a very light picture, is a very interesting work.

We may consider Titian as the first great landscape painter, though in his paintings it was only an accessory; but his construction of landscape by the use of shadows, of which I have already spoken, is one of the inventions or discoveries of painting. There are many fine drawings of landscape by him which you should see and study. His was, I think, the leading influence in treatment of landscape until the time of Claude and Poussin, when landscape painting may really be said to begin.

There was an old Fleming, Peter Breughel, who did some beautiful landscapes with figures (he was principally a figure painter) in the sixteenth century extremely rich in colour, and with a naïve rustic feeling that reminds one a little of Millet. I should imagine him to be the first “rustic” painter, and one of the best. After him, from Rubens, who painted many fine landscapes, we come down to Rembrandt, whose influence is still the leading one in the Dutch school. There is a little-known Dutch artist, Hercules Seghers, a landscape painter, who lived a little before Rembrandt, and is believed to have greatly influenced him in his feeling for landscape. I think only one of his paintings is definitely known; but there are a number of very beautiful etchings in the British Museum, some printed in different colours, a method which he is believed to have invented. These are very remarkable works, and should be studied. From Rembrandt, through Ruisdael, Hobbema, Vermeer of Delft, down to our Norwich school, to Gainsborough and Constable, and to Turner, the connection is all clearly traceable and well known. The great French school of the forties—the Romanticists, as they are called—Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, and their allies, received their impulse through Constable. Delacroix was influenced by him also; and the later impressionistic developments of landscape painting in France may be traced to the inspiration of Turner.

Any view of outdoor nature may be said to be a landscape; it may be the barest record of facts, or it may give something like a vision, with hardly any support at all from facts: the range is very wide. But in what does the charm of a landscape consist? It must be a record of a scene; that is, it must be true to the appearance, and must show the facts of nature under the influence of some definite effect of light. But there must be something more. An accurate record of a scene, although it may be true to the facts, will not charm, will not move us so much as a picture where the effect, or sentiment, of atmosphere or light is the dominating motive.

Constable pointed out that painters should not think that the sky terminated at the horizon, but should realise that it comes all through the picture, and close up to us. That there is a particular tree, river, or hill in a certain place is of no great interest. The interest for us lies in seeing or recognising the great elemental forces of nature, living and acting in and through the little things upon the earth. A landscape should not be so much an inventory as a transcript or translation of a mood of nature. Its appeal is to the primitive instincts—not to primitive people, not so much to people who pass their lives in the open air; for they take nature and its changes as a matter of course, and look on the weather as a capricious master whose whims have to be met, and a tree only as so much timber, or flocks and herds as so much stock. This is really quite a natural and proper view, but the artist’s view is outside this; and a picture of landscape appeals mainly to the primitive instincts of cultivated people, of people who live in cities, who look from the standpoint of civilisation with a sentimental longing towards a more simple state. The French gallants and ladies of the eighteenth century liked to imagine themselves shepherds and shepherdesses; and we, with our increased development of commerce and industry, have an increased appreciation of landscape, as if, since we cannot live with Nature, we would still be reminded of and be brought, even at second hand, into association with her.

The wide range of vision or treatment in landscape, as compared with that of figure painting, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at any rules which can be generally applied; for selection of subject seems more determined by emotion or impulse, and less by reason, than in figure work. The landscape painter is more instinctive than the figure painter, and, as a rule, is less definite in his study of form, or seems so; but has a finer sense of gradation of colour. But the building up of a landscape seems governed by pretty much the same unformulated rules as of a figure picture, and to depend on the same elements—the balancing of light by dark, and the contrast of warm and cool colour, so that the masses of the picture shall be agreeable to the eye; and the study of pictures, carried on concurrently with the study of nature, is the only way by which a student can learn how he can bring his vision of nature within the limits of a picture. I mean, by the study of pictures, that the student should follow the plan indicated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, if a picture pleases him, take the trouble to note and, if necessary, make a memorandum of the general masses of light and dark, where they come, and in what degree, so as to learn the general disposition of the main things.

All the great landscape painters have presented Nature in the way I have indicated, as records of her moods. Claude, in his picture of the “Queen of Sheba,” did not, we may be sure, care about the Queen of Sheba at all. She was only a point for his picture; nor was he much interested in the towers, columns, and palaces which frame his picture. What he wanted to paint, what he wanted to impress upon us, was the beauty of the evening sun shining in the clear sky over the sea; and so well did he do it that the sun still shines in his picture, after over two hundred years. No one but Turner has ever equalled him in the knowledge of subtle gradations of light. An infinite space in air is suggested without forcing the range of colour; for the lightest part of the picture is far from white, and the darkest part by no means black.

In another picture of his, “The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca,” also in the National Gallery, the subject is not the marriage, which is a mere incident, to give excuse for some figures as spots of colour, but the beautiful peep of sunlit country seen through the trees. In this picture we may remark how the dark trees accent the sky and the river, and how dark they have to be painted to express the lightness of the sky. Their colour is sacrificed to their tone. Claude did not wish us to look really at anything but the stretch of open country. We notice the trees, but our eye goes through to the distance.

Wilson and Turner followed in the same path. Wilson’s work is most beautiful in its direct, full painting, but he is limited in his range; while Turner’s seems to know no limit, for he touched the extremes of light and dark, of sunshine and of gloom. Such pictures as the “Shipwreck,” the “Sun rising in a Mist,” and the “Calais Pier” show the power which he possessed—in which he is quite unapproachable—of giving the greatest minuteness of detail without losing the breadth of the general impression. In his later work, as in the “Approach to Venice,” detail was suggested rather than expressed, but it was fully suggested. How delicate, in these pictures of his later time, are the gradations, and how slight the intervals between the tints!

Turner’s enormous range, his comprehensiveness, and the beauty of his vision should be studied in his drawings as much as in his paintings. I do not, indeed, know if the drawings do not to the artist express his qualities best.

The work of Constable touches on smaller things and the more homely aspects of nature. He sees things at close quarters; his range is not so great. He felt the beauties of everyday nature, of trees and fields under the sky, and painted them with a clearness and a freedom from convention which were then new in art. As you know, when his pictures were shown in Paris in 1824, they were welcomed as a return from conventionality to nature, and made the point of departure for what is now known as the Romantic school, the finest group of painters that France has produced. “The Valley Farm” in the National Gallery is, I think, one of his finest works. How beautifully his trees are drawn! I think one of the most difficult things in painting is to paint a tree. The most difficult of all, perhaps, is to paint a sky which shall really be a sky; but as this means that all the other elements in the picture shall be in accord with it, to paint a good sky is to paint a good picture. It is not so very difficult to copy a tree, but to paint it so as to make it live, to give us the impression of life that a tree gives us when we look at it in passing, or without sitting down to paint it, is a thing that few can do well. How often, when we set about painting a tree—or anything else, for that matter—we lose, even in looking at it, the charm that attracted us! We get confused, I suppose, with the infinity of detail, and by our intentness on each particular part, or by analysing each part separately, our minds are taken away from the general idea of the whole which made us wish to paint it; and we end by getting a painting of the branches and leaves, but not the living tree. We miss it, somehow. One often sees trees painted that look all cut out at the edges, like trees on the stage, and when we look at the edges of a tree against the sky, we see that they look cut out, too; but if we look at the tree as a whole—as a great green dome, spreading up and rounding into the sky, with the light shining on it and through it—if we can realise this, we can get a little nearer to our tree. Sir Joshua Reynolds touches on this in his discourses, and advises students to study the general masses and disposition of their trees, and not to devote themselves to painting each particular part.

Constable saw his trees as a whole, and so did Rousseau, Cecil Lawson, and Corot. Theodore Rousseau was the greatest French landscape painter of our time. There are two fine pictures of his in the Louvre—one, a marsh in the evening, and another of an opening through trees at sunset (I think there is a version of this in the Wallace Collection)—which are most perfect and beautiful things; his work is fine in colour, severe in drawing, and has a wide range of effect. And Cecil Lawson, one of our best landscape painters, was very like Rousseau in his austerity and fine sentiment, and in his large view of nature.

One of the most delightful of landscape painters is Corot, whose work has a lightness of touch, and a kind of happiness in its delicate sentiment, which are altogether his own. He is another painter who arrived at ease of execution through beginning carefully and hardly. There are some of his early pictures of Rome in the Louvre, very beautiful, and, at the same time, very hard and precise; and I have seen drawings—life studies—of his, all elaborately worked with the hard pencil-point. He was able to paint, or to suggest a tree, in the most delicate way. Constable, Rousseau, and Lawson preferred the sterner and stronger trees—the elm or the oak—but Corot loved the delicate trees, especially the willow, and effects of twilight or dawn; and he rendered the mystery produced by tiny interlacing leaves, which look sometimes like a mist against the sky, in a very beautiful way, which was, I think, his own. But this is only an incidental beauty of his work, which is remarkable in its expression of the clearness and fresh beauty of nature; although, as compared with Turner, his range is very limited, and we feel his mannerisms when comparing him with Rousseau.

Claude, Poussin, Wilson, Turner, and Corot all lived and worked in Rome, and I think this influence shows in their work, in the sense of what is called style. There is in Italy something nobler in the natural forms than in our Northern lands, and the air is more serene; Italy has a beauty which has made and still keeps it above all others as the artist’s country.

Rousseau, the landscape painter, was associated with several other kindred spirits; and the greatest of these was his friend and neighbour, Jean François Millet, certainly one of the greatest artists of the last century. Everything about him and his comrades is so well known, and so easily accessible, that I need do no more than touch on his work. He was, I think, the first, perhaps the only modern, to approach nature with the simplicity of the early painters. I mean simplicity of mind rather than of method; as compared, for instance, with our Pre-Raphaelites, who varied from their contemporaries not so much in the nature of their subjects, which were much the same as those in vogue at the time, as in their method of painting them. But Millet was not the first painter of peasants. This was, I think, an artist of whom I have already spoken, the elder Breughel, quite one of the early men. There are a number of his pictures in the gallery at Vienna, of rustic scenes, harvesting, etc., very fine in drawing and colour, and painted for the sake of their subjects, and not as accessories, as are the charming groups of woodmen in the background of Bellini’s “Peter the Martyr” in the National Gallery. Breughel’s work is very little known in this country.

The work of Millet was a new note in modern art. No other has seen so clearly and shown so well the beauty and significance of ordinary occupations, the union of man with nature, and the dependence of man on nature. The peasant had been painted by the Dutchmen, but generally from the point of view of ridicule, and by Morland; but he was usually represented as drinking,—or resting in some way,—and was not painted, as Millet painted him, from cradle to grave, as one may say, in the midst of his daily work. One remembers, too, an ideal sort of peasant, painted by men who did not realise that his labour is hard, constant, and exacting, and who did not see the beauty of the simple movements necessitated by it. But Millet was painting things which he understood and felt thoroughly; yet his work, which we recognise now as being both true and beautiful, appeared to his contemporaries as a rather repellent rendering, and it was some years before he was properly appreciated. He was a great inventor—greater even as an inventor than as a painter; for he was not a facile painter, and painting with him was not an end in itself, but only a means of expression. His design was always most beautiful, and there is, I suppose, no incident of the peasant’s life that he has not made the subject either of paintings or drawings; and always the chief interest lay in the expression of the action or sentiment, and the type. Although his colour was harmonious, and sometimes very beautiful, these qualities of painting were of lesser importance to him than those of design. When the point of expression he sought was reached, he left off, whether his paint was smooth or rough; but he always gave as much detail as he wanted, and in some cases, as in his picture of a “Village Church” in the Louvre, it is carried to very great completeness, with beautiful colour all through. This is one of his finest works.

If we compare his work with that of Bastien Lepage, the greatest of those who have been inspired by him, we find Millet still the master, though Bastien, as a painter, was incomparably more able and skilful. Bastien painted the same kind of subjects, sometimes absolutely the same subject, as must sometimes happen. Not, like Millet, letting everything go for the sake of the expression, but painting for the sake of giving the true effect of people in the open air, with the light and actual colour of nature; at anyrate, this became the dominant motive, and he has done this more beautifully than any other. In some ways his work recalls that of the early Italian masters, such as Filippino Lippi, in its clear lighting and definite drawing, and intensity of expression. Yet its interest loses when compared with the work of Millet; or rather, a different point of view, one not so vital, is presented to us. The approach is so near, the study so close, that the portrait interest dominates and displaces the interest of the type, which Millet always preserved. And the necessity of painting from his model posing leads to Bastien’s avoiding sunlight and effect, and confining himself to an even light; and leads also to the qualities of action, and interest of subject, being sacrificed to truth of resemblance, so that we have two qualities to set against each other: in the work of Millet, the presentation of the type and the action; in the work of Bastien, the presentation of the individual and the surroundings. The sentiment was the same, but in this Millet was stronger. His qualities lead up to it, and enforce it, while Bastien’s tend to divert our attention from it.

There is a design of Millet’s, one of a series he drew on the wood for engraving—a mid-day rest—which we may compare with the “Foins” by Bastien Lepage. No doubt Bastien was inspired by Millet, and I think we must agree that the impression of the subject is stronger in Millet; of the individual in Bastien Lepage.

There is never, in the work of Millet, any consciousness of the spectator. His people are always intent on their occupation, not posing to the painter, not regarding anything outside their work. In the drawing of “Night,” how well the intentness of the figures is expressed! And nothing is forced; it is all quite natural.

I think the points of difference between these two painters, in spite of a common aim, are most interesting. They are both great artists; but the question is raised whether it is not better to give, though imperfectly, the leading elements of a picture, than to allow a lesser interest to arise and supplant it. It is a question for the artist which he considers the greater interest in his work; that he will necessarily express.

But Bastien Lepage, although he does not, I think, rank with the pioneer Millet, yet has a high place among modern artists, not only as one of the first who realised figures in simple outdoor lighting, but for the unaffected sincerity of his work; and we must remember that Millet completed his career, while Bastien’s was cut short by death.

Everything in nature is moving—not necessarily quickly, but nothing stands still for us; this sense of life and movement must be given in a picture with the measure of detail which may be necessary, and the result reveals the artist’s mind, showing on which qualities, and in what degree, his attention was fixed. Corot, I think, in one of his letters, says that when he was a young man, painting from nature, he used often to wish that the clouds would stand still, so that he could draw their forms; but that he had learnt later that it was a very good thing they did not, for the thing to express in clouds was their sense of movement. It must be a matter for the personal feeling of the artist how he expresses the movement of nature. No rule can be given, but we recognise it, or its absence, in a picture. We have a different feeling in looking at a sunrise from what we have in looking at a sunset, although at any one moment, if we saw it only for that moment, we could not tell whether we were looking at a sunrise or a sunset; and the reason is, I think, that our sensations are, in one case, of a progression from darkness to light, and in the other from light deepening into dark; and some expression of this feeling, although he may be quite unconscious of the means he uses for the purpose, will be given by the painter. In the same way, too, if we are painting figures engaged in any action, it will not bring to our minds a clear image of the action, if we only give one momentary phase of it such as a snapshot would give; for we have in our minds an impression produced by successive phases of the action, and a rendering will suggest itself which, though probably not true, as a snapshot would be, to the action at any particular instant, will give the general sense of it more truly. If more than one figure is engaged in the same movement, the whole can be expressed by representing each figure at a different stage of it. A good example of this may often be seen when men are breaking up the streets, where four men will drive a steel wedge into the hard road with sledge-hammers, striking in turn on the wedge; or in a row of men mowing, or of horses walking. One can, in such cases, by referring from one figure to the other, give the complete movement.

But whatever we are able to get direct from nature, in studying movement, should be revised afterwards, and considered in reference to the impression of the movement which we have in our minds, for what remains in our minds is the essential thing.