There were doubtless many other evidences of a changing taste, but the book that most distinctly marks a new era is Batty Langley’s “New Principles of Gardening” in 1728. In his Introduction is the iconoclastic statement, “Nor is there any Thing more shocking than a stiff, regular Garden where after we have seen one quarter thereof, the very same is repeated in all the remaining Parts.” His campaign against regularity is consistently carried out through the book. He comments on some gardens that seem to him “forbidding” because laid out with “that abominable Mathematical Regularity and Stiffness, that nothing that’s bad could equal them.” And again, “Nor is there any Thing more ridiculous ... than a Garden which is regular.” Of straight walks and hedges he wrote, “To be condemned to pass along the famous vista from Moscow to Petersburg, or that other from Agra to Lahore in India, must be as disagreeable a sentence, as to be condemned to labor at the gallies. I conceived some idea of the sensation ... from walking but a few minutes, immured, betwixt Lord D——’s high shorn yew hedges.” He regards cutting down fine old oaks in order to make a regular garden as “a Crime of so high a Nature, as not to be pardon’d.” In planning his grounds he allows “no three trees to range together in a strait line.” He advises conducting the walks so that they shall lead through “small Enclosures of Corn ... Hop-Gardens ... Melon-Grounds ... Paddocks of Deer, Sheep, Cows, ... with rural Enrichments of Hay-Stacks, Wood-Piles, etc.” His final dictum is that all gardens must be “grand, beautiful, and natural.” He is thoroughly romantic in his idea of beauty, for not only is regularity debarred, but “misshapen Rocks, strange precipices, Mountains, old Ruins,” are counted as indispensable. If ruins cannot be actually found or built, he would even have them “painted on Canvas.” Batty Langley’s book is of especial importance since at so early a date it formulates many of the principles on which the landscape gardeners worked.

Pope’s “Fourth Epistle” in 1731 marks an epoch in English garden literature, not because he says anything new but because of the great weight of his name and because of the high literary quality of the poem. Pope’s scornful picture of the formal garden sums up most of the characteristics objected to by earlier writers:

Pope also gives explicit support to the theories of the landscape gardeners. In the lines,

are given, he said, in concise form the three heads to which all rules of gardening are reducible, namely “the contrasts, the management of surprises, and the concealment of bounds.” The fundamental distinction between Pope’s conception of a garden and that of the formal school rests in the fact that Pope would seek to conceal or obscure all traces of man’s interference with Nature, while Nature’s ductility or manageableness was frankly shown in the formal garden and constituted one of its charms. Pope was also definitely in line with the landscape gardeners in his belief that the garden should melt imperceptibly into the surrounding park scenery. “Conceal art,” “destroy boundaries,” “imitate Nature,” these were Pope’s maxims and they sum up the doctrines of the new school.

The three professional gardeners who established the landscape school were Bridgeman, Kent, and Brown. To the first of these Horace Walpole gives much credit. After commenting on the gardens of London and Wise he says,

Though Switzer gave early expression to the ideas praised by Walpole, Bridgeman was apparently the first to put these ideas into practice in any notable way. His work at Stow was complete some years before 1724, for in that year Lord Percival wrote, “Bridgeman laid out the ground and plan’d the whole, which can not fail of recommending him to business. What adds to the bewty of this garden is, that it is not bounded by walls, but by a Ha Ha, which leaves you the sight of a bewtifull woody country, and makes you ignorant how far the high planted walks extend.”

William Kent (1685–1748) was Bridgeman’s successor at Stow, and here and in other great gardens, he made bold experiments along the lines rather timidly marked out by Bridgeman. Walpole says of Kent, “At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden.” Kent’s dominating principle, “Study Nature and follow her laws,” marked the completeness of his break with the formal schools, and was the basis of his best work, but it led also to absurdities. Since Nature apparently abhors a straight line, all paths and avenues and streams were sent serpentining around in the most tedious and unmeaning fashion. Francis Coventry said that no follower of Kent would be willing to go to heaven on a straight line. Kent even went so far, at one time, in his desire to follow Nature, as to plant dead trees in his parks. But, on the whole, his work was marked by a genuine love of Nature, and he at least succeeded, as Walpole says, in “routing professed art.”[552]

Kent’s most important gardens come between 1730 and 1748. One of the first of those incited by the beauty of his “Elysian scenes” to make over their own domains was Lord Lyttleton. His estate, Hagley, was a ferme ornée much admired in its own day, and an excellent illustration of the new style. The accompanying print shows that the forest trees come close to the house and grow unfettered. There are open glades ornamented by temples and seats, and enlivened by the presence of animals, which, according to the new scheme of beauty, had at last come into their own as ornamental elements of a landscape. Philip Southcote’s “Wooburn Farm” is another early ferme ornée. Charles Hamilton’s “Pain’s Hill,” in Surrey, shows a somewhat different type, which Walpole calls “the forest or savage garden.” In this garden, continues Walpole, “all is great and foreign and rude; the walks seem not designed, but cut through the wood of pines; and the style of the whole is so grand and conducted with so serious an air of wild and uncultivated extent, that when you look down on this seeming forest you are amazed to find it contain a very few acres.” The approximate date of “Wooburn Farm” and “Pain’s Hill” is determined by the fact that in 1761, in Dodsley’s “London and its Environs,” they are spoken of as “but lately laid out,” and so not very much advanced in growth, but yet “very beautiful and extremely well worth seeing.”[553] The most famous eighteenth-century “ferme ornée” was Shenstone’s estate, known as “Leasowes,” and this is also somewhat earlier in date, for a poetical tribute dated 1754 calls it “that new-form’d Arcadia.” Eight other poetical eulogies show the place of Leasowes in popular esteem. Dodsley published a map of the place with thirty pages of minute description of the arrangement of the grounds.[554] There was a prescribed order in viewing the estate, the path leading from surprise to surprise, a gay, lively scene being immediately succeeded by one “cool, gloomy, solemn, and sequestered.” Various scenes were sentimentally suited to particular persons, or to especial trains of thought. One glade was devoted to lovers, another to fairies; one spot was set apart for reflections on death, another for communion with the spirit of Virgil. Each separate portion had its rocks, waters, trees, and shrubs, arranged according to a ruling idea, the idea being brought into prominence by a suggestive inscription, and further emphasized by a seat so placed that from it the idea could present itself with cumulative effect. Shenstone paid great attention to artistic combinations. In his “Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening,”[555] 1764], he said concerning the art of “distancing and approximating,”

Shenstone’s work was certainly based on the most elaborate art but his whole purpose was so to use art as to conceal it. “Art,” he said, “should never be allowed to set a foot in the province of nature, otherwise than clandestinely and by night.” “Whatever thwarts nature is treason.” Whenever art is allowed to appear, “night, gothicism, confusion and absolute chaos are come again.”

One of the earliest poetical champions of the picturesque development of landscape gardening is William Mason, author of “The English Garden,” a long didactic poem, begun in 1767 but not published till 1772, and then in an incomplete form. The purpose of the book is to apply “the rules of imitative art to real nature.” Folly and Wealth are called “the cruel pair” who, “borrowing aid from geometric skill,” strive by line, plummet, and unfeeling shears, to deform the fair surface of mother earth. Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, are called upon as the true law-givers in gardening. Much credit for the banishment of false taste is accorded to Addison and Pope. Of the latter he says,

Mason claims both Bacon and Milton as progenitors, the former “because in developing the constituent properties of a princely garden, he had largely expatiated upon the unadorned natural wildness which we now deem the essence of the art;” the latter “because of his having made this natural wildness the leading idea in his description of Paradise.”[556] Another element of interest in Mason’s Preface is his reason for writing his poem in blank verse. He confessed that the didactic nature of the theme seemed to call for the heroic couplet, but since every charm in gardens springs from variety, since the gardens he praised represented Nature scorning control, he felt that he must get a verse form as unfettered as Nature herself.[557] During the slow publication of Mason’s “English Garden” there appeared in 1770 Thomas Whateley’s “Observations on Modern Gardening,” which summed up in admirable fashion the achievements of the landscape school. It is of especial importance as being “the very first treatise professedly on landscape art.”[558] Walpole’s “The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening,” was written in 1770, but was not printed till 1785 when it came from the Strawberry Hill press with a French translation on the opposite pages by the Duc de Nivernois. The essays by Walpole and Whateley cover about the same ground and advocate the principles of the same school, but Walpole’s fame and his brilliant style have combined to give his work pre-eminence, and his essay ranks in the garden literature of the eighteenth century as Sir William Temple’s essay does in the seventeenth century.

William Kent’s successor in gardening was Lancelot Brown (1715–83) who was kitchen-gardener at Stow when Kent was there as designer. Brown’s original work does not begin till about the middle of the century when he became royal gardener and was employed at Blenheim. After that he was concerned in laying out or in altering “half the gardens in the country.” In 1767 Viscount Irwin thus eulogized him:

But immortal Brown, while enjoying to the full the favor of owners of great estates, had sturdy and loud-spoken critics. The ruthlessness with which he destroyed fine old grounds, and especially fine avenues of great trees, the unhomelike effect of his stretches of bare, undulating lawn, his serpentining walks and streams, aroused active hostility. Cowper in “The Task,” 1785, said,

Late in the century Richard Payne Knight was so extreme in his attack on Brown’s unpicturesque smoothness and finish as to express a preference even for the formality of the old school. He thus describes the designers of the school of Brown:

To his mind statues, urns, terraces, mounds, parterres, topiary work, though all “against Nature,” were preferable to a whole estate “shorn and shaved” after the manner of Brown. Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829) to whom Knight dedicated his poem also opposed Brown, saying in prose with almost equal heat what his friend had put into verse.[562] The points made against the works of Brown, and likewise of his master, Kent, were the tameness and monotony, the over-cultivated appearance, of their grounds. The central thought of Knight and Price, as of Gilpin,[563] their contemporary, and, earlier, of Mason in “The English Garden,” was that a garden should be “picturesque,” that is, should be “composed” as a picture is. Landscape painting secured its best effects from rough, natural, varied scenes, hence gardens should, if possible, show similar combinations. The essential difference between Brown and the advocates of the picturesque is brought out by two plates published by Knight. The first of these shows the truly picturesque. The elements of the landscape are: a stream flowing at its own will between natural and uneven banks; groups of spreading trees and shaggy shrubs in natural union; fern-covered knolls; intricate thickets; mossy stones; “cherished weeds;” a prostrate tree, rough and gnarled; “native stumps and roots” overgrown with wild vines; and a rude bridge. The second plate shows the same scene as “dressed by an improver,” evidently of the Brown school. We now see the stream flowing between close-shaven banks; over it a frail Chinese bridge; clumps of trees in the most orderly and trim fashion; the grounds smoothed and cleaned like a drawing-room; unmeaning curves in stream and walk; and a vast expanse of lawn stretching in monotonous undulations to the bare-looking modern house.

The controversy was carried over from Brown to his disciple and imitator, Sir Humphrey Repton (1752–1818). Repton in a courteous “Letter to Uvedale Price,” 1794, and again in his “Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening” (chap. vii and Appendix), 1795, defended the principles of landscape gardening adopted by Kent and Brown and followed in his own work. Price answered in “A Letter to Humphrey Repton,” 1795. In opposition to the claims of the devotees of the picturesque Repton put forward the beauty to be found “in the milder scenes that have charms for common observers,” and he protested against the rigid application of the laws governing landscape painting to an art so different in its views and possibilities as gardening. But Repton, though he had entered upon his work as the disciple and imitator of Brown, gradually changed, discarding the formalities of Brown and adopting a more varied and natural style of ornamentation. He made use of some of the ideas of the “artistical” or picturesque school, but so modified them according to the dictates of good sense and good taste, as to establish the beautiful and natural parks and gardens in which England led the world.

The picturesque garden had two offshoots that cannot be passed over. The idea of imitating a picture, when carried to an excess, led to frantic effort to put cliffs, precipices, gnarled oaks, ruined, moss-grown fortresses, ivy-hung abbeys, into every landscape. Frequent sage advice is given as to the best ways to secure these effects. Richard Jago, a friend of Shenstone, urges the importance of appropriate sites—a cliff for a ruined castle, a well-water’d vale for “the mouldering abbey’s fretted windows.”[564] In 1772 Gilpin criticized Shuckburgh because the ruins were not “happily fabricated,” but he adds in exculpation, “It is not every man, who can build a house, that can execute a ruin.” There follows a long list of the mechanical difficulties, with the following conclusion, “When it is well done, we allow, that nothing can be more beautiful: but we see everywhere so many absurd attempts of this kind, that when we walk through a piece of improved ground, and hear of being carried next to see the ruins, if the master of the scene be with us, we dread the encounter.” In “The Spiritual Quixote,” 1773, is an amusing account of a visit of Sir Geoffry Wildgoose to a noted estate. The ignorant keeper in showing off various objects of interest calls attention to the “turpentine walks,” and then leads the way to the ruins explaining that it was built “but a few years ago; and his Lordship used to say, he could have built it as old again, if he had had a mind.” An antiquary present exclaims,

Mr. Mason, in “The English Garden” deprecates building ruins, but thinks a man to be congratulated if on his grounds

This search after ruins was a morbid and exaggerated development of the new love of the old, the wild, the picturesque, just as the sentimental melancholy in poetry was a morbid and exaggerated development of the new poetic turning to emotional introspection, to solitude, to thoughts of death and the grave. In the extreme form both phases were ephemeral, and, it is interesting to note, were nearly contemporaneous. Batty Langley was advocating “ruins” in gardens in 1728 but it is not till after the middle of the century that they seem to have been accepted as a necessary part of an estate, and this is just the period when the spirit of sentimental melancholy in poetry, a spirit that had found early expression in the night-piece of Parnell and Lady Winchilsea, reached its culmination.

The subject of oriental gardens was also much discussed in prose and verse. In 1752 appeared “An Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens at Pekin” by Père Attiret, translated by Sir H. Beaumont (i.e., Joseph Spence).[565] In 1760 came Goldsmith’s “Description of a Chinese Garden.” Most influential of all was “A Dissertation on Oriental Gardens” by Sir William Chambers in 1772. The practical influence of the discussion of Chinese gardens went little beyond the building of summer-houses and bridges in the Chinese style. But the naturalistic school in England was strengthened by an appeal to the Chinese method of copying Nature “in all her beautiful irregularities,” while the sentimentality of gardens such as Leasowes seemed to receive sanction from the efforts of Chinese gardeners to construct scenes with the express purpose of arousing certain emotions. The “fancies and surprises” of Chinese effects were pleasing to those who, as Sir William Chambers, thought Kent’s English gardens “no better than so many fields.” The popularity of writings on oriental gardening is furthermore significant of the enlarged horizons, the prevailing interest in the new and the remote, characteristic of one phase of romanticism, and it is to be classed as a sign of the times along with the interest in oriental eclogues in the realm of poetry.

Incomplete and cursory as so short a study of so great a subject must be, the facts here presented seem to warrant the following statements:

The feeling toward Nature in the period studied shows in gardening the same order of development, nearly the same dates, and the same phases as in poetry. There was first in both a pleased recognition of the supremacy of man, a rigid exclusiveness, a love of order, of symmetry, and of definite limits. Then came, in the early eighteenth century, a tentative turning from art to Nature; then an epoch-making statement in each art, Thomson’s “Seasons” from 1726 to 1730, and Pope’s “Epistle” in 1731. From this point on the development was in mass and variety rather than in the enunciation of new principles. The growing love for wild Nature in the poetry, and the passion for the picturesque in gardening proceed side by side. At the end of the century all is ready in both arts for the splendid work of the new era. Throughout the century both have had curiously correspondent offshoots or temporary fads—sentimental melancholy in poetry, and the ruins, artificial and real, in gardening; foreign eclogues and studies of distant countries in the one art, and Chinese gardens in the other.

CHAPTER VI
LANDSCAPE PAINTING

It is the purpose of this chapter to indicate how far and in what way painting lent itself to the expression of that new love for Nature which, as we have seen, gradually became dominant in the realm of poetry, fiction, travels, and gardening. Such an inquiry is beset with peculiar difficulties in the case of pictures because they are seldom dated. At best we usually know only whether a picture is early or late in the artist’s career. After the beginning of public exhibitions with catalogues, which was not till 1760, something like accuracy in dates becomes possible, but the information thus obtained is not entirely reliable for the reason that pictures were not always exhibited the year they were painted, and it is certainly inadequate because so small a proportion of the pictures painted reached any exhibition. Furthermore, the pictures most important in establishing the early use of landscape would come before 1760. A second difficulty arises from the inaccessibility of much of the material, especially the important early material. Whatever was printed in a book had many chances of survival. A single brief poem indicative of a new love of Nature, even though a poem but lightly regarded by the author and his contemporaries, would hold its small place in his works and share in the reduplicated life of the tragedies, satires, and didactic poems to which he intrusted his fame. But an equally slight picture, though equally indicative of a new tendency, would have no such fate. Unregarded, unpurchased, its ultimate destiny would be destruction, or, possibly, burial in some attic. Even such of these pictures as still hold their own in some collection are widely scattered and often in private galleries not open to public inspection.

This inaccessibility of much of the original material would be an insuperable difficulty from the point of view of the student of technique, but is less formidable in the present study which has to do not with qualities that would give the picture high or low artistic rank so much as with the thoughts the artist strove to express, his tastes, his feelings, the conception of Nature that guided his work. For this purpose we have as authentic material not only original pictures whenever obtainable, but also reproductions of various sorts, along with biographies, letters, and critical essays. From these scattered sources it becomes possible to make a brief but not wholly inadequate statement concerning the place of the external world in English eighteenth-century art.

I. LANDSCAPE IN PORTRAITURE

As a picturesque accessory in portraiture landscape received early recognition in English art. Even the miniaturists found space for landscape backgrounds,[566] and Vandyck, who was painting in England from 1621 to 1641, established the use of landscape elements in large portraits in oil. Sometimes, where the portrait is inevitably in the open air, as in the equestrian portrait of Charles I in the National Gallery, the landscape is worked out with much beauty of detail, but as a rule Vandyck makes use of Nature as an accessory rather than as a full background. Various devices, as an open window or door, a space framed in by heavily draped curtains and massive pillars, or an outlook over a balustrade, serve to enrich the picture by a glimpse of sky, a bright horizon line, or a stretch of vaguely indicated country. He also frequently uses a rock as the direct background, the rock revealing itself as such only at the edge where tufts of foliage or a gnarled tree branch out against the sky and an indeterminate landscape.[567] In no case does Vandyck subordinate the portrait to the landscape, nor does he combine the portrait and the landscape with the idea of securing a general decorative effect. The landscape remains always simply as background or as an enlivening detail.

Vandyck’s most important successor, Sir Peter Lely, who was in England from 1641 to 1680, but whose great vogue was after 1660, made frequent use of open-air settings, especially in his portraits of women. The “Windsor Beauties”[568] sufficiently attest his command of landscape effects. Princess Mary as Diana, the duchess of Cleveland as Minerva, the duchess of Richmond, the countess of Falmouth, Mrs. Middleton as Pomona, Mrs. Stewart, are fair women whose picturesque beauty is enhanced by the poetic and romantic landscapes against which they stand. There is, to be sure, no attempt at verisimilitude. There is no thought of a real landscape to which the person in the picture has some natural relation. Walpole says in derogation of Lely that his nymphs trail their embroideries and fringes through the thorns and briars of pastoral landscapes, but the fact is that these Dianas and Minervas and innocent shepherdesses of the Nell Gwynn variety are no more in these landscapes than they are actual goddesses or country maidens. The landscape is but a sort of wall-painting or figured tapestry used as a decorative background. These portraits are of importance in the present study because they show that while Lely as portrait painter rightly cared especially for the figure, he had yet an appreciation not common in his time of the beauty of the world about him.

It would seem as if the example of Vandyck and Lely and their great fame would have established the use of landscape as a portrait convention, and it is true that Lely’s pupils[569] made some attempts in this direction, but under the leadership of Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) the custom gradually fell into disuse. Kneller, practically supreme in England during the half-century before his death, painted the kings and queens and royal families of England, the beaux and the belles, the statesmen and the wits, so that a gallery of his portraits would afford a survey of the notable social and intellectual England of his day. Commissions came in upon him too rapidly to allow much time for carefully studied backgrounds. Sometimes he uses a rock background in the manner of Vandyck, but even more conventionalized, as in his “Madam Turner,”[570] and there is an occasional landscape in the manner of Lely, as in the “Countess of Ranelagh.”[571] The “Hampton Court Beauties,”[572] painted in emulation of the “Windsor Beauties,” are the portraits in which we should expect the richest use of landscape, and Kneller’s tall, elaborately gowned ladies, do stand in front of gardens with pillars and balustrades, with hints here and there of a red sunset, but not even the best of these backgrounds, that in the portrait of Lady Middleton with lamb and crook, has Lely’s grace and poetic suggestiveness. Now and then, when there is some reason to emphasize the portrait as a picture, Kneller brings all his ingenuity into play and crowds the canvas with decorative detail. The little duke of Gloucester, for instance, is rendered almost pathetically childish by his varied and elaborate surroundings,[573] but the combination of draped curtains, marble steps, massive pillars, a huge sculptured urn loaded with flowers, a balustraded terrace, and, beyond it, a park landscape under a cloudy sky, gives an impression of confused magnificence, with none of the artistic restraint of Vandyck, none of the elusive, romantic charm of Lely.

After Kneller, Jervas (1675–1739), Richardson (1665–1745), Hudson (1701–79), and Highmore (1692–1780) were leaders in portrait painting. Jervas has occasional effects reminiscent of Lely as in the portraits of Dorothy Walpole and Mrs. Howard.[574] Hudson’s “Duchess of Ancaster,”[575] clad in the richest brocade, roped with pearls, stands stiffly erect in front of a rock that harks back to Vandyck. These pictures and others of their class well illustrate the wooden and unmeaning use of landscape characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century. Certain conventions from the great days of a century earlier still remained, but deprived of all charm or significance. With the successors of Kneller portrait painting reached the lowest point of the decline that had been steadily going on since Vandyck, or, at least, since Lely. Walpole, who had a high opinion of Kneller, said of his successors,

The darkness that seemed thus at the middle of the century to be settling down around the art of portrait painting was, however, the darkness that precedes the dawn, or, in this instance, the full day, for with the first portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds after he returned from Rome in 1752, and with the work of Thomas Gainsborough, his immediate contemporary, we enter upon the supreme period of British portraiture, a period in which there seemed suddenly to spring into being all the grace and skill, all the sense of beauty and poetry, all the power of imaginative interpretation, that had been waning in English art annals since the days of Vandyck. And with this great revival in the art there came a striking revival of interest in the use of landscape in portraiture.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) made use of landscape backgrounds in portraits of various kinds. His full-length portrait of Keppel was completed in 1753 and was the picture that established his fame. It is thus described by Lord Gower: “The gallant young sailor is represented as literally walking out of the canvas. His countenance is full of animation, and as he seems to step briskly, bareheaded, across the beach, his locks are blown backward from his forehead by the gale.... In the background a wild sea breaks on the shore.” This portrait, says Lord Gower, “made an epoch in that form of art.”[577] The epoch-making characteristics of the picture were, in the first place, the striking animation and naturalness of the figure as opposed to the monotony and woodenness of pose adopted by artists such as Hudson, and, in the second place, the genuine open-air effect of the whole picture, the perfectly simple and natural union of the figure and the landscape. In some other portraits of men Reynolds made use of landscape backgrounds, as in the half-lengths of Admiral Keppel (1780) and that of Lord Heathfield (1787) in which the figures stand forth boldly against a stormy sky with a suggestion of an ocean view. Some landscapes show reminiscences of Vandyck, as in the backgrounds of the equestrian portraits of Captain Orme (exhibited 1761) and Lord Ligonier[578] (about 1760), or in the conventionalized tree-trunks and distant view in the half-length of the archbishop of Armagh.[579] It is, however, in full-lengths of women and children, either singly or in groups, that Sir Joshua makes freest use of landscape. The little Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, a chubby baby rolling on the grass with her dog; Prince William of Gloucester in plum-colored cavalier costume standing on a hill against the sky; the Lady Caroline Montague Scott, a bright-eyed little maiden standing in a snowy landscape, her hands in a big muff; little Miss Cholmondeley valiantly carrying her dog over a brook; the four-year-old Viscount Althorp, a quaint little figure outlined against lovely effects of sky and foliage, are but a few of the children Reynolds has painted with admirable life and charm and in the midst of natural out-door surroundings. Even more elaborate attention is given to the landscape backgrounds in the full-lengths of women. Such portraits as those of the Marchioness Camden, Mrs. Crewe as St. Geneviève, the Viscountess Crosbie, Lady Betty Compton, the Duchess of Devonshire, the countess of Salisbury, Miss Mary Moncton, the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Bampfylde, Mrs. Bonfoy, or Mrs. Carnac, show abundantly the skill with which Reynolds united figures, drapery, and landscape so as to secure a harmonious and decorative general effect.[580] It often happens, indeed, that the faces of these tall aristocratic ladies are hardly remembered, so strongly is the attention caught by the flow of line, the shimmer of fabrics, the abundance of charming scenic detail. Mrs. Jameson says that Reynolds was the first English artist to venture upon light and gay landscape backgrounds. In his portraits of women we do not find the stormy skies, rude rocks, and blustering weather against which Lely’s ladies posed. Reynolds delights in typical English park scenery, with its variety of wood and water, its soft, dim distances, its rich clumps of trees. He often uses, too, the architectural elements appropriate to a park, but never in a hard or obtrusive fashion. His steps and balustrades, his columns and urns, gleam out from masses of foliage or are overhung with a wealth of vines and flowers. The whole effect is rich and stately, suggestive of lovely order and nurture, and is particularly well suited to the fashionable dames who are thus enshrined. In general we may say that Sir Joshua’s use of landscape in portraiture surpasses in amount that of any preceding master, and that his scenic backgrounds are unrivaled in the qualities of naturalness and charm, and in artistic suitability for the personages portrayed.[581]