The Golden Age of British Art
Young as was British art in the eighteenth century, during the second half of the century England’s portrait painters held a place in the very front ranks of contemporary European art.
Their fresh, unworn lustre shone the more brightly in a period that elsewhere was rather dim. Foremost on the roll of these painters of portraits stand two names side by side - Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough - for the owners of the names lived near together and knew each other, and painted famous likenesses of many of the same famous men and women. Reynolds was four years old when Gainsborough was born, and he lived four years after Gainsborough’s death.
The genius of Reynolds and the genius of Gainsborough were of such different strains that they seem each to supply what the other lacks. While Reynolds was an eager student of art in books and in the works of the greatest painters, traveling abroad and copying their pictures in foreign galleries, until he became a truly learned connoisseur, Gainsborough gave himself to nature as to the supreme teacher and never traveled outside his native island, going back again and again to the woods and fields he loved best. Reynolds was a thinker, of keen, acute, well-balanced mind. He sought and learned how to get the results he wished. Gainsborough felt what he wished to express, and it came through his brush naturally or not at all. Reynolds was systematic and industrious, planning out his time and carefully observing his own regulations. Gainsborough followed his impulse; he might stand unoccupied for hours looking from the window of his studio, dreaming of beauty. His muse would not be driven. Therefore, although Reynolds left about four thousand paintings, Gainsborough can be accredited with not more than three hundred, and of these about eighty are landscapes. To both men we give our admiration - to Reynolds for his fine, deep color, his warm but subtle tone, his skillful and understanding way of presenting the figures and the personalities of his sitters; to Gainsborough for the soft, elusive, haunting beauty of scenes and forms in which we perceive his own tender wistfulness mingling with the unspoiled charms of nature’s self.
Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) was the son of a learned clergyman of Devonshire who kept a grammar school. It was there that Joshua studied as a boy, although he spent much of the time that was due to Latin and mathematics in dreaming or eagerly getting all that he could out of a few books on the principles of art. And because his drawings showed unusual skill and a mastery of the points he had studied out for himself, he went at the age of nineteen to London to study with a painter who was then a favorite but whose work has no value to us now. In a few years the young man confidently established himself in an independent studio. Then he had the great fortune to be offered a trip to Italy.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, First President of The Royal Academy
Among the paintings of the Italian masters in the galleries the young Englishman walked, disappointed and dismayed because he could not feel their force and beauty as be had anticipated. But devotedly he studied and copied until he gained what he had lacked, and when he returned to England his knowledge of European painting was broad and discriminating. He was an authority. Immediately favor turned toward him. People flooded him with requests for portraits, and it was not long before he had a large house in London, with a luxurious studio, where he painted industriously from eleven until four every day. From that hour on be gave himself to social life, entertaining freely the most interesting and distinguished men of the time. Garrick the actor, Goldsmith the writer, Burke the statesman, and Dr. Johnson the philosopher were a few of his intimate friends, portraits of whom he has left us. At his balls the best society of London came together, for he was as noted for his distinction of manner as for his excellence in his art.
In 1768, when the Royal Academy was instituted, he was at once chosen as its president. Then he was knighted by George II, who later made him painter to the king. The last word of his last public address was by intention the mighty name of the artist who was his greatest admiration - “Michelangelo.” When Sir Joshua died he was honored in every possible way. He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London.
Reynolds had remained a bachelor, with a sister to help keep his house; but who has painted pictures of childhood that we remember better or more affectionately than some of his? Groups of little ones with their mothers, like thatof Lady Cockburn and her children; portrait studies, like Master Hare and Little Miss Bowles with her dog; and others, like the Age of Innocence, and the cluster of Angels’ Heads, which are really five different studies of the one darling little head of Frances Isabella Gordon. Both of the last two pictures are in the Nationai Gallery, London. The painting of Master Hare can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where there are several other Reynolds portraits. Many of his works are in the Royal Academy and the National Portrait Gallery in London; but numbers of them are in private collections in both Europe and America.
Sir Joshua, by experimenting in the production of the colors he most desired - warm browns and reds - used some materials that were not lasting, so that in some cases the paint cracked and sometimes even fell from the canvas. Thus a few of his paintings have been lost. He loved to give his portraits a grand manner, with heroic or historic feeling. And for pleasure he painted historic compositions. In the portrait of the actress Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse we can trace his intelligent admiration for Michelangelo’s style. In others we can feel the influence of Correggio, Raphael, Leonardo, Murillo and others. He did not imitate, but he had absorbed. Hogarth said: “There is only one school, that of nature.” Reynolds said: “There is only one doorway to the school of nature, and of that the old masters hold the key.”
Thomas Gainsborough, Who Loved His Native Countryside
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) was another English lad who neglected study for love of drawing and for love of the outdoor world, though he won greatest fame as a portrait painter. Always a dreamer and impulsive in his tendencies was Gainsborough; and his expression in line and color was spontaneous and free. Reynolds had moved with ease in a sphere of large experience in life. Gainsborough, more shy and retiring, had to be drawn into prominence. Although at fifteen he went to London to study, when three years afterward he began his career as an independent artist it was back in the retirement of his old haunts.
He loved a quiet life in his own home, with his wife and his music and his dreams. He loved the familiar countryside of his boyhood, where meadows, trees and streams had sung to him and given him his first visions of beauty. There he lived and worked for fourteen or fifteen years before going to Bath, where he became popular as the portrait-painter of fashionable beauties and of royalty.
When he painted his rare portraits of lovely women he set them in an atmosphere of naturalness, for he seems to have perceived within them the impulses and feelings that belonged to them as human beings. His own sensitiveness helped him to catch vibrations from their hidden selves. A gentle melancholy and a brooding tenderness breathe lightly through the delicate colors with which the artist made his record of the impressions that came to him from his sitters. His pictures of children - whether peasants or gentler-born-show them moving with natural freedom through the light and air of out-of-doors. Among the most valued of his portraits are that of Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire (now in America) and that of the Honorable Mrs. Graham (in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh). For the most part his works are in private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.
Characteristics of Two Great Portrait Painters Compared
Sir Joshua Reynolds held that “the chief masses of light in a picture should always be of warm, mellow color, and that the blue, gray or green colors should be kept almost entirely out of these masses.” Whether or not, as has been said, Gainsborough deliberately took this as a challenge, he produced some most striking and beautiful pictures in which blue, gray and green form the central and dominant notes. Of these the most famous are his portrait of Mrs. Siddons in a blue-and-gray-striped gown and the picture known as the Blue Boy. In the latter - now in California - a charming boy in a costume of rich, pure blue stands out engagingly before a background of brown and green landscape.
As a rule, Gainsborough’s color is tender, soft and cool, greens and blues and grays and delicate yellows predominating; although in his landscapes - which he loved best of all to paint - he introduced warmer tones, rich browns and sometimes red. The landscapes show the same natural way of looking at things that we have noted in the portraits, the same originality of treatment. They are quiet in tone and feeling, with something of mystery or melancholy in their clouded skies or in the forest shade. They were made for his own pleasure, and few of them were sold during his lifetime. Appreciation of their value has grown with time, and they are considered the first examples of landscape showing a modern realistic treatment.
Gainsborough had not the reliable and cultivated correctness of Reynolds; but grace and spontaneity are in all his works - a peculiar distinction due to his faculty for seeing beauty in all simple things. “He had beauty in himself, and all his life it fed on simple delights.”
Sir Joshua Reynolds’ tribute in an address after Gainsborough’s death held a prophecy which has been fulfilled. “If ever this nation,” he said, “should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honorable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.”
George Romney, Greater in Gift than in Character
In George Romney (1734-1802) we come to an artist whose gift was great enough to make him a rival of Reynolds, but who had not the steady will, the resolution, in using his gift to carry it to the high performance for which it was fitted. In control of line he surpassed even the greater men, and his color and vivacity give his pictures true charm. While he did not make elaborate plans of composition, he had a natural ability for placing his figures so as to give a beautiful arrangement of masses and lines. The background is usually plain, laying the more emphasis on the portrait itself.
Romney’s faults are due to defects of character and to insufficient early training rather than to lack of genius. He had a tendency to lay plans larger than he could carry through, and in his later life this became almost a form of insanity. With one undertaking partly accomplished, he would turn from it to some new delightful project that beckoned. Had he possessed a firmer will, he would no doubt have reached great results.
Although his best work is to be seen in some of his portraits (chiefly in private collections), he painted, besides, historical and ideal scenes. His interesting and sad story is told elsewhere.
In Scotland’s Allan Ramsay (1713-84), a contemporary, you see, of the English painters of whom we have been thinking, painted portraits of many Scottish gentlemen and ladies which made his name well- known in England as well as at home. While his color is sometimes hard and opaque-looking, his drawing of the features is fine, and his pictures are marked by a grace that is characteristically his. The portrait of his wife is one of his most charming portraits. The latter part of his life was spent in England, where he became court painter to King George Ill.
Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), another Scottish painter, in childhood left an orphan and early apprenticed to a goldsmith, learned for himself the arts of miniature and oil painting. Possessed of the very qualities that Romney had not, he lost no opportunity of improving his knowledge and technique.
Scotland owes to this son of hers admirable portraits of many others of her honored children, including Sir Walter Scott. They are sincere and forceful likenesses, broad and well handled, somewhat crude in color and tone, but interesting in their vigor and power of characterization. Of Raeburn’s romantic marriage, which opened the way to study on the continent, you may read elsewhere. He became president of the Society of Artists in Edinburgh and, before his death, was knighted by the king. His portraits are in the National Galleries of Scotland and England and in a number of other public and private collections. One of the finest is that of Sir John Sinclair.
Among the lesser portrait-painters of the period in England we shall speak of three - Hoppner, Opie and Lawrence.
John Hoppner (1758-1810) confessed himself to be a follower of Reynolds; and though he painted some landscapes and pictures on ideal subjects, his portraits, especially those of women and children, are considered his most successful works. They are still sought and treasured, although time has dimmed the beauty of their coloring. An attractive example of his portraiture is the group of the Sackville children. Hoppner was a man of social accomplishments, who could count among his sitters members of the royal family and such celebrated persons as Sir Walter Scott, Wellington and Lord Nelson.
John Opie (1761-1807), when as a young man he went to London from his native Cornwall, became the fashionable portrait painter of the town, hailed as the self-taught, independent artist. After the wonder had subsided and he was less pressed with orders, he worked hard to learn how to overcome his faults, and divided his time between portraits and historical canvases. His pictures have far more vigor of treatment and more individuality than elegance and grace.
In Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) we come to the successor of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the post of painter to the king. Lawrence showed unusual talent as a boy and won fame while still in his teens. When he was only twenty-one years old, he was elected to the Academy by especial favor. Having started so young to observe and record the forms and features of society, he became very skilled in reproducing the airs and graces of its ladies and gentlemen. He drew well and painted in an easy manner, using a brilliant coloring that was sometimes hard in effect. Of all that he produced his pencil and crayon studies are rated as the most successful.