Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) uses landscape with as much insistence as Reynolds, but not in the same manner. His backgrounds are not so elaborately worked out, yet with all their slightness and sketchiness they are more imaginatively suggestive. It is, indeed, astonishing to perceive with how little reality of detail Gainsborough contrives to call up a vital impression of Nature in her most enchanting aspects. A still subtler source of charm rests in his power to fuse figures and landscape into an effect of perfect unity. The “Musidora” in the National Gallery is a picture before which, even in its present state, one could linger long in absorbed contemplation, without once mentally separating the figure and its surroundings. There is such a harmonious blending of lovely lines, of soft, rich hues, that the whole picture seems to have sprung from a single impulse. Sir Walter Armstrong says that in general Gainsborough’s landscape backgrounds “are nothing more than the extension over the unoccupied part of the canvas of the sentiment governing the sitter.”[582] Mr. Van Dyke points out the effect of the landscape in the famous portrait of “Mrs Graham,” where “the castle wall, the deep glen at the left, the loneliness of the background, add to the romance of her face.”[583] The portrait of Mrs. Robinson as “Perdita”[584] or that of “Mrs. Sheridan”[585] are even more convincing proofs of his ability to present a landscape inexplicably akin to the personality of the sitter, a landscape that in some indefinably but most real way interprets and emphasizes that personality. It is in full-length portraits of women whose beauty is enhanced by an air of pensive melancholy that this subtle use of landscape is mainly found. But in group portraits such as that of “Mrs Moody and her Children,” or, lovelier still, that of “Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell,”[586] are landscape backgrounds every line and color of which serve to carry out and complete the grace and tenderness characteristic of the figures. In the “Squire Hallet and his Wife”[587] there is a harmony so penetrating that it haunts the mind like music. In “The Mall”[588] where there is no individual portraiture we seem at first to have but a Watteau-like effect of fashionably attired dames in a setting of rich park scenery. But presently we perceive that the whole picture conveys a sense of pathos. The ancient trees stretching up against the soft sky in immemorial majesty and beauty give to the onlooker a keen sense of the futile and evanescent life fluttering away its brief hour under their solemn and mysterious shadows.[589]

On the same wall in the Wallace collection hang Reynolds’ “Mrs. Carnac” and Gainsborough’s “Perdita.” Both pictures exemplify the possible heightened attractiveness of a portrait in which the artist has made skilful use of a landscape background. They also serve to illustrate a central point of unlikeness in the use of landscape by the two great artists. In Reynolds’ picture the beautiful setting can be conceived of as a landscape quite apart from the stately lady whose pose, figure, and draperies it so advantageously sets off. There is artistic harmony but there is no essential union. But Gainsborough’s background cannot be thought of by itself. It merely makes us conscious that the fair Perdita is out in the light and air, that behind her are real forest depths, that the pensive, appealing charm of her face is enhanced by the pathetic loveliness of Nature herself. With Gainsborough we have reached the subtlest and most perfect use of Nature in portraiture, and his supremacy is based on the fact that his landscapes serve the true purpose of backgrounds. They never offer an individual beauty that rivals or eclipses that of the person, but they contribute to build up an impression the very heart of which is the characteristic effect made by the sitter.

After Gainsborough, from the studios of great artists such as Romney, Raeburn, Opie, and Hoppner, Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir Thomas Beechey, and many of lesser note, came many portraits with landscape work of power and significance, but it is not, in pursuance of this topic, necessary to take up their work in detail, for the reason that Reynolds and Gainsborough led the way, and for the further reason that after them there arose no new or superior way of using Nature in portraiture.

II. LANDSCAPE PAINTING

English landscape painting from 1660 to 1800 falls naturally into three periods. During the first of these which ends in 1707 with the death of the younger Van de Velde, there was considerable landscape work, but nearly all of it was by foreign artists.[590] We do, to be sure, find early in the period an Englishman, Robert Streater (1624–80), who, in addition to his fame as a painter of historical and mythological subjects on walls and ceilings, was counted “incomparable” in landscape. His contemporary popularity is attested by the fact that in James II’s collection were five of his landscapes, but such examples of his work as are accessible in public galleries hardly substantiate his reputation. He founded his style, it is said, on “the late Italians.”[591] At the end of the period is Francis Barlow (1626–1702) who, anticipating the themes of George Morland, crowded his farmyard scenes with fowls of many varieties, with pigs, sheep, horses, cows, donkeys, and even deer. A tinted drawing by him in the South Kensington Gallery illustrates his lively conceptions, and indicates his clever use of landscape backgrounds. Working with Barlow as an engraver was Francis Place[592] (1647–1728) whose best plates were of animals, but who sometimes etched landscapes “for his own amusement.” A print of his “View of Scarborough” in the Print Room of the British Museum shows, in spite of the conventional wool-bag clouds, a notable attempt to represent truly a bold and rugged cliff with a distant sea-view and waves rolling gently in on a curving beach. But with these unimportant exceptions the painters of landscape in England before 1707 were foreigners. And of the foreign artists only the Van de Veldes, father and son, achieved more than local and temporary fame. Willem Van de Velde the Elder (1610–93) was already a famous painter of sea-pieces when Charles II called him to England in 1675. At Hampton Court may still be seen many of his huge canvases, chiefly important as pictorial chronicles of English naval achievement, but showing also effective use of sea and sky. The eighteenth-century estimate of Willem Van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707) is expressed in Walpole’s dictum, “Pre-eminence is no more to be contested with Raphael for history than with Van de Velde for sea-pieces,” and he still ranks as one of the great marine painters. English galleries, both public and private, are rich in beautiful examples of his work.[593] No other name so illustrious occurs in Walpole’s annals of this period. Of the other foreign painters it is sufficient to say that they were men whose habits of thought, whose tastes, as well as their technique, had been established in Holland, Flanders, or Italy, and who did their mature work in England because the desire of Charles II to revive the art activities fostered by his father seemed to offer a good professional opening. The fact that they painted in England had hardly more influence on the course of English art than would have been exerted by the importation of their pictures. They founded no schools, they excited little emulation or even imitation. They were merely second- or third-rate workmen who painted along in a manner studiously reminiscent of their earlier masters. Such slight effect as their work had in developing the love of Nature in England came from the fact that Englishmen at last saw depicted some of the wild or romantic scenes of their own country, scenes from Scotland and the Isle of Jersey, from the neighborhood of Derbyshire Peak, from along the banks of the Thames. But such slight influence as this attention to local scenery might have had, was, it must be insisted, nearly neutralized by the fact that these representations of English scenery were always so “touched up” in the style of some Dutch or Italian master as to be practically unrecognizable. Instead of observing Nature the artists “composed” pictures, using elements conventionally accepted as picturesque. They trained themselves to see England through the eyes of Salvator Rosa or Ruysdael or Claude Lorraine or the Poussins.

The second period of landscape art in England comprises the forty-eight years between the death of the younger Van de Velde (1707) and the return of Richard Wilson from Italy in 1755. In studying this period a convenient point of departure is given by M. Rouquet’s “L’état des arts en Angleterre,” published in 1755. His only reference to landscape art is in the following interesting but rather vague paragraph:

M. Rouquet’s words seem to imply a much larger amount of successful and popular landscape work than extant pictures or the meager annals of the time would indicate. Possibly in the landscapes that were “fort à la mode” were included important Italian works, or the works of foreigners painting in England. There must have been, also, more landscape production than is in any way recorded, so that M. Rouquet doubtless had knowledge of pictures now practically non-existent. And even the following summary of such names and works as have survived a century and a half will give his words a modified justification.

Peter Monamy (1670–1749) was a marine painter of the school of the younger Van de Velde. “The Old East India Wharf at London Bridge,” a large and interesting canvas at the South Kensington Gallery, and “The Calm,” a small but very attractive picture at Dulwich, go far toward the maintenance of his great contemporary reputation. A second marine painter of much promise was Charles Brooking (1723–59). Of the few pictures by him in London galleries the most delightful is “The Calm,” a picture recently added to the National Gallery. A series of his naval reviews was reproduced by Boydell in 1753, and other works were engraved by Canot and Ravenet. Samuel Scott (1710–72), after Van de Velde the most important marine painter of the century, did some of his fine views of the Thames and old London bridges as early as 1745. Excellent examples of his work are in the National Gallery and at South Kensington.

There were also during this period several men whose chief pictures were of animals, but with considerable incidental use of landscape. James Seymour (1702–52), known as a portrait painter of fine horses, also painted many hunting-scenes where horses and dogs are trooping at full speed through broken country. Contemporary with Seymour was John Wootton (d. 1765) the excellence of whose representations of animals is well shown by his illustrations of Gay’s “Fables” in 1731. Wootton was also painting landscapes in the Italian manner before 1751. George Stubbs (1724–1806) began his work as an animal painter before the middle of the century. In 1740 he broke away from conventions by resolving never to copy any picture but “to look into Nature for himself and consult and study her only.” This sturdy independence ripened in 1754 into a determination to visit Italy in order to test his opinion that “Nature is superior to all Art,” a dictum worthy of note so early in the century.

Landscape painting specifically so called begins with the topographical draughtsmen of the early eighteenth century. If a draughtsman had any susceptibility to the beauties of Nature his sketch almost insensibly took on various adjuncts from the scenes about him till his work gradually merged into landscape painting for its own sake. One of the earliest topographers was Samuel Buck (1696–1779) who, with his brother Nathanael, brought out over five hundred views between 1723 and 1753.[595] Their work, stiff and crude as it is, did not confine itself to buildings or bird’s-eye views but shows some attempts at adornment by the introduction of sky and foliage. William Taverner (1703–72), another early topographer and landscape painter as well, is represented in South Kensington by one sepia drawing of a path by a river, and by a singularly attractive water-color landscape, a composition in the Italian style. Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse refers also to a view of a sand-pit at Woolwich, and to “an extensive and beautiful landscape” (now at Whitworth Institute, Manchester) showing the view from Richmond Hill. Taverner’s reputation was justly high in his own day. Smollett in “Humphrey Clinker” makes Matthew Bramble say of Taverner in a letter to Dr. Lewis (May 19),

After Taverner’s death “The Gentleman’s Magazine” for 1772 reiterated Smollett’s statement but in a stronger form calling Taverner “one of the best landscape painters England ever produced.” Mr. Monkhouse speaks of him as “the artist who could most justly challenge Paul Sandby’s claim to the title of the father of the English school of water-colours in the production of faithful landscape.”[597] About contemporary with Taverner is George Lambert (1710–65), engravings from whose landscapes were published in 1749. In the Print Room of the British Museum his work is represented by six attractive engravings, and there is a fresh, modern looking painting by him in the National Gallery.[598] Lambert chose as themes mixed country of slow streams or quiet lakes, with bushy shores; low, wooded hills; stretches of arable land with thatched cottages under embowering trees. In most of his pictures the rich, peaceful scene is enlivened by the presence of domestic animals, cows standing lazily in pools, sheep huddling along the road, horses coming heavily home from the day’s work. There are also men, women, and children engaged in various country sports or occupations. George Lambert is one of the first English artists to attempt what may be called domestic landscape. Contemporary with Lambert is Thomas Smith (d. 1767), known as “Smith of Derby” from the town where he chiefly resided. His “Views of Chatsworth” are dated 1744, and Vivares engraved some of his views of Derbyshire in 1745. A print from his “View of Dunnington Cliff,” dated 1745, shows a river winding in tortuous fashion into the remote distance, with wooded hills on one side, balanced on the other by meadows stretching away to a low hill crowned with a little church. The foreground shows scraggly trees, a waterfall, a lock, cattle grazing, and figures variously occupied. The crowded canvas lacks unity of impression and is thoroughly conventional in arrangement, but the details are English and are painted with manifest appreciation and a very evident attempt at fidelity. George Smith (1714–76), or “Smith of Chichester,” belongs in time with Lambert and Thomas Smith. He and his brothers were the first to establish a local school of landscape art. In 1760 he was awarded a premium of fifty pounds for “A Landskip, half-length,” the first premium given by the “Society of Arts” for landscape work, but he had done considerable Claudesque painting before this time. In spite of his imitative manner his themes are the lovely scenes about Chichester, and he painted them with genuine affection. A pleasing example of his Italian style is in the South Kensington Gallery. A dark line of foreground with tufted brownish trees on each side frames in a still lake; a fine effect of distance is given by misty blue hills beyond the lake; and sunset effects—a tender blue sky with grayish little clouds softly brightened by yellow light from the diffused golden glow along the horizon—are delicately repeated in the mirror-like water. Another early artist of whom little seems to be known is William Bellers.[599] Numerous engravings by Mason from landscapes “Painted after Nature by William Bellers” occur from 1752 to 1759. He was a Cumberland man and nearly all of his pictures are of scenes in that county and in Westmoreland. As art his work cannot rank high, but not even his fluffy hills, tossed together without a suggestion of rock foundation, nor his lack of aërial perspective, can obscure the delight with which he painted the picturesque scenery of his native regions. Bellers was apparently the first one of the long line of Lake Country artists and his pictures antedate by some years the known descriptions in poetry, travels, and fiction. Thomas Smith also painted in Westmoreland and other northern counties but there is no means of determining whether his pictures are earlier or later than those of Bellers. Alexander Cozens (d. 1786), was sent to study art in Italy. He returned to England in 1746 and exhibited from 1760 to 1781. There are at South Kensington several examples of his work, especially two interesting mountain landscapes. In the British Museum are fifty-four drawings which belong to his Italian period. Some of these are extensive views. Some of them show interesting experiments such as the attempt to represent sunlight streaming through clouds. “Altogether,” says Mr. Monkhouse, “these show that Cozens before his arrival in England, was a well-trained artist who observed Nature for himself, and was not without poetical skill” and Mr. Monkhouse finds in the “imagination, ingenuity, and trained skill” of the father adequate explanation of his son, John Robert Cozens, whose work will be noted in the next section.[600] The work of Alexander Cozens was particularly that of teaching art.[601] John Boydell (1719–1804), better known as a publisher of prints than as an original artist, yet did some interesting early work. In 1736 his interest in scenery was aroused by “a book of well-executed landscape engravings.” In 1745 he brought out a series of “landscapes for learners” the tremendous success of which laid the foundation of his great fortune, and throughout his life his activities as publisher were largely affected by his love of scenery. He was the first artist to paint in Wales. A large print done by him from one of his own pictures and bearing the date 1750 is an attempt to represent Mount Snowdon. Paul Sandby (1725–1809) is of more importance in the history of landscape art than any of the men already mentioned, but most of his work belongs after 1755. His sketches in the Highlands, whither he went as draughtsman on a road survey, were, however, made during the years 1746–51[602] and his exquisite aquatint studies of the country about Windsor belong about 1751–52 when he was with his brother Thomas at the deputy ranger’s lodge at Windsor.

That early landscape painting was not confined to England may be shown by reference to some Scotch and Irish artists. Alexander Runciman (1736–85) was born in Edinburgh. He began to paint landscapes before he was twelve. “Furnished with pencils, and brushes, and colours, he took to the fields; his first sketches were rocks, trees, and waterfalls.” At fourteen he was placed in the studio of John and Robert Norris where he showed himself “one of the wildest enthusiasts that ever devoted themselves to the art.” “Other artists,” it was said, “talked meat and drink, but Runciman talked landscape.” By 1755 Runciman set up as landscape painter on his own account, but he speedily learned that though landscape might bring applause it was not an art whereby even a moderate livelihood could be obtained and by 1760 the young painter had turned to other realms.[603] John Norris, of whom little is known except that he was Runciman’s teacher, was nevertheless in his day reckoned “a celebrated landscape painter.” Brydall says that he was “probably the first to create, or at least to minister to the taste for landscape in the Scottish metropolis.”[604] In Ireland was an obscure artist named Rogers who has been called “the father of landscape art” in that country. His pupil, Butts (d. 1764), painted early landscapes said to be “impressive copies of the wild scenes which abound in the county of Cork, and the romantic views that abound on the margin of Black Water.”

From this catalogue of names and dates several facts emerge. In the first place, nearly all the landscape work mentioned belongs after 1740. From 1707 to about 1740 English landscape art can hardly be said to exist at all. Even the foreign artists so much in evidence in the preceding period are no longer to be found in England.[605] George II frankly hated “boetry and bainting” and the reigns before him were hardly more hospitably inclined to aesthetic claims outside the realms of portraiture and history painting. This lack of royal patronage would sufficiently account for the dearth of foreign painters, and perhaps, also, for the lack of English landscape painters. All native art-impulse would likewise feel the inevitably deadening effect of the universal and rigid acceptance of foreign canons of art. But whatever the cause, the fact remains that most of the English landscapes M. Rouquet speaks so enthusiastically of in 1755 must have been painted in the preceding fifteen years.

In the second place, the landscape art, though technically not of high rank, is yet, by its amount, the range of its themes, and its suggestions of a new personal feeling toward the external world, an important contribution to the growing love of Nature. The output of the years 1740–55 is really surprisingly large and correspondingly varied in theme. There are three artists who paint successful marines, and three whose studies of animal life take good rank. In landscapes we find much emphasis on the pastoral beauty of England, its hills, streams, lakes, woods, meadows, and thatched cottages. Wilder scenery is also portrayed, for by the middle of the century the Highlands of Scotland, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, the Lake District, and Wales, have all received recognition as true subjects for landscape art. And there is, in the case of every artist, even of those who feel most strongly the dominance of foreign masters, a very evident study of the details of English landscapes and an eagerness to record in painting the charms felt by the artist. It should also be noted that, though nearly all the more important pictures were the work of English artists, yet native artists began to paint scenery at about the same time in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The period from 1755 to 1800 is throughout rich in landscape production, but the thirty years between 1755 and 1785 is the most significant portion of the period. These are the years during which landscape art was established in England and during which it won the greatest laurels it was to have before the great days of the early nineteenth century. The two famous artists of this notable thirty years were Wilson and Gainsborough and it will simplify the account if we take up their work before that of their lesser contemporaries.

Richard Wilson (1714–82) was born at Penegoes near Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire, Wales, but while still a child, his father, the Rev. John Wilson, went to live at Mold, Flintshire, and there the lad was brought up. Talent of some sort as an artist he early evinced and at fifteen he was sent to London to study portrait painting, a profession at which he worked steadily for twenty-one years, and by which he apparently made a fair income though his portraits never rose much above mediocrity.[606] At thirty-six he went to Italy for further study. During his six years there he devoted himself exclusively to landscape. He remained in Venice a year; with William Lock he made a slow tour from Venice to Rome; with Lord Dartmouth he went to Naples; from Rome as his headquarters he made many excursions into the surrounding regions; and throughout all these travels he was tireless in the production of studies, sketches, pictures. Through the generous praise of recognized authorities such as Zucarelli, Mengs, and Vernet, a report of his surprising achievements reached England, and when he returned to London in 1755 it was to find his reputation practically established. His solemn style did not, however, at once commend itself to the artists of his time. Wright says that his return excited “some interest and much criticism in the coteries of art,” and that certain artists “who then constituted themselves, what they called A Committee of Taste, and led the understanding of the public in art” sat in judgment on Wilson’s work and resolved “That the manner of Mr. Wilson was not suited to the English, and that if he hoped for patronage he must change it for the lighter style of Zucarelli.” When this committee waited on Wilson it was met with cool contempt,[607] and he painted on in his own fashion. But the committee’s estimate of patronage was apparently correct, for during the lifetime of the artist, in spite of the fact that during a period of twenty-five years he assiduously painted landscapes, he did not achieve an even moderately comfortable livelihood. His life was one of sordid financial shifts and of growing bitterness of spirit, until, in 1780, through a small inheritance, he was enabled to retire to a little patrimony in Wales, where, broken and enfeebled, he spent the two years before his death.

Wilson’s work as a landscape painter began certainly as early as 1750 in Italy, and all probabilities are in favor of the supposition that it began earlier in England. To be sure, no juvenile sketches, no anecdotes of youthful tendencies, remain to substantiate this conjecture. Even the “View of Dover,” the one landscape known to have been painted before the Italian visit, is no longer in existence. But the fact that this picture was at once engraved by J. S. Miller would seem to indicate that it was counted a work of some importance. Furthermore, when Wilson began his work in Italy there was no apprentice period. Work done in the early years there shows a management of landscape detail and composition quite equal to that of his later work, and such as would not be prepared for by the most zealous study in portraiture. It is, indeed, hardly believable that a pronounced passion for landscape such as characterized Wilson should never have tempted his brush till he was thirty-six, and should then, at the chance words of a fellow-artist suddenly open out before him as his life-work. Edwards Edwardes is responsible for the anecdote that attributes Wilson’s change from portraiture to landscape to the advice of Zucarelli. But we have, on the other hand, the more probable account given by Mr. Hastings in a volume of etchings made by him from the Ford collection of Wilson’s paintings. Mr. Hastings gives Mr. R——s (probably Mr. Samuel Rogers, the author of “Italy” and an art connoisseur) as authority for the statement that an influential patron of the arts, Mr. William Lock of Norbury, perceived Wilson’s bent toward landscape of the grand sort, and urged him to go to Italy as the best place to perfect himself in that art. Mr. Beaumont Fletcher, Wilson’s latest biographer, considers that the artist was fully conscious of his powers as a landscape painter, and that his visit to Rome was premeditated for the purpose of study in that particular line.[608] Sir Walter Armstrong also maintains the probability, almost certainty, of landscape work by Wilson prior to the Italian tour.[609]

The landscapes painted by Wilson between 1755 and 1760, the date of the first public exhibition of pictures[610] in England, cannot be absolutely identified, but he was probably spending much of his time in painting from the sketches made in Italy. In the exhibition of 1760 was his “Niobe.” In the same year he painted an upright picture of the Arno for the drawing-room mantel-piece of a patron in Platt Hall, Manchester. In 1761 were exhibited “The Lake of Nemi” and other Italian pictures. The “Phaeton” appeared in 1763, the “L’Anconetta” in 1764, the “Villa Madama” in 1765, and many other Italian pictures in these and successive years. By 1768 he had exhibited about thirty landscapes nearly all of which were based on his Italian sketches, and it was his custom through his life to paint pictures the chief elements of which were the sunny skies and ruined temples of classic regions.

A recognition of the great influence of Italy over Wilson’s mind and art should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that he gave equally sympathetic response to the scenes of his own land. When Stothard was a student at the Royal Academy he asked Wilson to suggest to him something to copy, and Wilson, who happened to be looking out over the Thames, responded that there could not well be anything better to copy than that. That he loved English scenery becomes apparent when we study such pictures as the lovely “English Landscape”[611] in the possession of the Rev. Stopford Brooke, the “River Scene with Castle” in the South Kensington Gallery, the “View on the Wye”[611] in the National Gallery, the “De Tabley House” in the possession of A. T. Hollingsworth,[612] “Wilton in Wiltshire,”[613] “View in Kew Gardens,”[614] “Sion House,” and “A View near Chester.” The dates of these English pictures can seldom be determined, but it is evident that he made occasional sketching tours, for the exhibitions record views in Bedfordshire, Devonshire, and Cheshire, besides those of places in the immediate neighborhood of London such as St. James’ Park, Windsor Great Park, Kew Gardens, and Hounslow Heath.

But none of these English pictures, and few even of his Italian ones, can compare in dignity and beauty with his notable Welsh views. He certainly visited Wales before 1766 for in that year he exhibited two views from North Wales, “Carnarvon Castle” and “Northwest View of Snowdon.” It seems very likely that when he was painting at Manchester and Chester in 1760 he took the opportunity to visit his old home, but there are no dated Welsh pictures before 1766. But even this date gives him no predecessors among artists painting in Wales except men so inferior as John Boydell and Anthony Devis. Other Welsh pictures were exhibited by Wilson in 1771 and 1774. In 1775 Boydell published “Six Views in Wales,” engravings by Byrne and Rooker from Wilson’s pictures. Britton in his “Fine Arts in England” (1805) said that “Wilson’s ‘Six Views’ were the most important topographical views ever published in England.” But they only partially represent the great amount of work done by Wilson on Welsh subjects. In the Print Room of the British Museum are engravings from many other fine Welsh pictures such as “The Great Bridge over the Taafe,” engraved by Canot, “Kilgarren Castle,” engraved by Elliott, “Pembroke Castle” by Mason, “Carnarvon Castle” by Byrne, “Snowdon Hill” by Woollett, “The Summit of Cader Idris” by E. and M. Rooker. Even in the engravings these are pictures of very great nobility and charm. One original “Snowdon” picture is in the Manchester Art Gallery. It is called “A Welsh Valley with Snowdon Hill” and is of the rarest beauty. The rough foreground slopes, the distant mountain bathed in light and delicately outlined against the softest of skies, the mists rising from the hidden valleys, are magically combined into a picture adequate in its presentation of the facts of Nature, and having, also, a strong poetic and imaginative appeal. A beautiful print after Wilson in the British Museum is another, “Snowdon Hill,” by Woollett. The loneliness, the serenity, the majesty, and the beauty of mountain regions are portrayed by Wilson with an essentially modern feeling.

It was many years before any other artist so well illustrated Blake’s phrase, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet,”[615] as did Wilson. For fifteen impressionable years he had lived in North Wales and his mind and heart had been insensibly affected by the sublimity of mountain scenes. Wales had given as important and effective tutelage to him as did the Lake District to the youthful Wordsworth sixty years later. Wilson is reported to have said that Wales “afforded every requisite for a landscape painter” but we need no testimony beyond his pictures to show with what power these rugged cliffs and deep ravines, these silent lakes and tarns, these tumultuous streams and waterfalls, these lonely mountain masses towering into the sky, spoke to him both as an artist and as a man when, in mature life with mature power, he returned to the land of his birth. He painted Welsh scenes with boldness and freedom, with grandeur, dignity, and impressiveness, and with a power of divination that must put him high in the ranks of painters of mountain scenery in any age.[616]

In one characteristic Wilson’s Italian and Welsh pictures are alike. He was temperamentally susceptible to the pathos of ruins. His Italian pictures are steeped in a sense of inescapable sadness. Through the loveliness of Nature runs the mournful memory of fallen grandeur, of races who have lived and loved and are no more. But the ruined strongholds and castles of his own land touched him even more deeply. The bright stillness of Kilgarren Castle on its rocky cliff, mirrored in the smooth surface of the river below, is more beautiful and more subtly suggestive of “old, unhappy, far-off things” than are the Italian pictures.

Through all Wilson’s pictures we feel, furthermore, a quality of genuineness in both observation and feeling. He studied the great masters of landscape, but not as a copyist. He compared their work with Nature which he studied for himself. Ruskin says of him,

Mr. Beaumont Fletcher in developing this conception of Wilson as one able to see with his own eyes, very justly points out that his idealism, even in the Italian pictures, is based on a singularly close representation of the facts of Nature. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds when he objects to Wilson’s use of classical figures incidentally testifies to the truth of his landscapes which are, says Sir Joshua, “too near common nature to admit the supernatural.”[618]

Wilson has been called “a painter’s painter,” and various testimonies show how deeply impressed later distinguished artists were by his work. Sir James D. Linton[619] points out that “Turner carried Wilson’s methods so far in some of the works of his early middle period as almost to amount to imitation,” and notes a picture by Turner of “Kilgarrin Castle” “so like Wilson in manner, treatment, and colour that it might fairly be called a ‘Wilson Turner.’” Constable, also, though he did not choose the grand themes, and though he rejected the classical mannerisms of Wilson, was yet one of his great admirers. Of a visit to the gallery of Sir John Leicester in 1823 he wrote, “I recollect nothing so much as a large, solemn, bright, warm, fresh landscape by Wilson, which still swims in my brain like a delicious dream. Poor Wilson! think of his fate, think of his magnificence.”[620] Of Wilson’s place in the development of art Ruskin says, “I believe that with the name of Richard Wilson the history of sincere landscape art, founded on a meditative love of nature, begins with England.”

Thomas Gainsborough, though mainly known as a portrait painter, showed an early and persistent bent toward landscape. Before he was twelve it was his delight to spend his mornings in the woods near his home at Sudbury in Suffolk, sketching from streams, trees, cattle, sheep, and peasants. In 1741, at fourteen years of age, he went to London and studied, first under Gravelot, then under Hayman, and finally set up a studio of his own. His ostensible work was portraits for which he charged from three to five guineas, but he likewise painted landscapes for such prices as they would bring. From 1745 to 1759 he was again in Suffolk, but this time at Ipswich, twenty-two miles east from his old home at Sudbury, and in the region between the Orwell and the Stour, the region afterward made famous by Constable. During the Ipswich period he was slowly building up a reputation as a portrait painter; but here, too, he made “Madam Nature, not man, his sole study.” He did much sketching along the picturesque banks of the Orwell and in the groves of oaks and elms in the neighborhood of Ipswich. That he painted many landscapes while at Ipswich is indicated by the fact that Governor Thicknesse called upon him in 1754,[621] and was much struck by the great beauty of the small landscapes mingled with the rather stiff portraits in the artist’s studio. None of these landscapes can now be identified, but it was their excellence that gained from Governor a commission to paint “Landguard Fort,” important as the earliest known of Gainsborough’s landscapes, though, even in this case, the original picture has perished and is known only through Thomas Major’s engraving. To the latter part of the Ipswich period belong the “Cornard Wood,” “View of Dedham” and two small uprights in the National Gallery, besides seven or eight other canvases attributed to these years. The landscapes of this period were strongly influenced by Dutch artists. The most noteworthy picture of the Ipswich years, the “Cornard Wood,” might almost, says Mr. Boulton, have been painted by Both or Berghem. The Dutch fidelity to the details of the scene in this picture was shown in two other probably contemporary landscapes of which Mr. Fulcher wrote, “They were both drawn and coloured in the open air: in one of them a young oak is painted leaf for leaf, while ferns and grasses are portrayed with microscopic fidelity.”[622] Gainsborough’s life at Bath (1760–74) was marked by almost exclusive attention to portraiture, yet in the midst of his successes here he wrote, “I’m sick of portraits and wish very much to take my viol-da-gam and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint landskip and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness and ease.” Quin said at this time that when a portrait was on the easel Gainsborough was disposed to growl at all sublunary things, but if he was engaged on a landscape “he was all gaiety, his imagination in the skies.” He employed the intervals between sittings in studying the fine trees in his neighborhood. He painted numerous landscapes and rural scenes during the Bath period, the more celebrated ones, such as the “Market Cart” of the National Gallery, the “Harvest Wagon,” and the “Cottage Door,” belonging to the later years of that period. During Gainsborough’s last or London period (1774–88) he still kept up his interest in Nature and took a house on Kew Green that he might have a convenient center for sketching tours along the banks of the Thames, and many landscapes were produced during these years. Walpole says of one exhibited in 1777 that it was “by far the finest landscape ever painted in England, and equal to the great masters.” Another in 1779 Walpole called “most natural, bold, and admirable.” Six landscapes in 1780 he characterized as “charming, very spirited, as admirable as the great masters.”[623] Walpole’s favorable opinion of Gainsborough was quite generally shared by artists and critics, but even in his case there was but a small purchasing public, so that when he died in 1788 his house was found to be filled with unsold landscapes. This fact, and the large sums he could command for portraits, make it all the more striking that out of a total of eight hundred and eighty-seven pictures about a fifth should be landscapes.[624]