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INTRODUCTION

ART AND LANDSCAPE AS SOCIAL HISTORY

M

EN of genius come out of the dark," said Ruskin, and live most gloriously in the light after they are dead. They work to satisfy themselves, and die (as a rule) before they have raised the public to their own level; while men of second-rate talents, gravitating by instinct to the public taste, may become as popular as music halls, and as ephemeral as topical songs.

Besides, those who live near to great men can scarcely expect to see them in focus, as a whole and in the right perspective; it is distance that lends correctness to our views of real genius. For a similar reason the Swiss are unastonished by their own mountains, and do not feel much tempted to climb the peaks. This perilous exercise they leave to the professional guides, as we hand over to connoisseurs and critics the work of discovering the hill-top men in art and literature.

These and a number of other thoughts in the same matter must be often present to the mind of any one who is at all concerned in the study of English rural painters and their places in the perspective of history. The greatest among them,

with one exception, were scarcely seen by their contemporaries, whereas a good many of the smaller painters were accepted as giants. To-day, on the other hand, the Witheringtons and the Creswicks are forgotten, while the big men whom they eclipsed -Cotman, for instance, and Crome and Constable -are up there, on the peaks of fame.

If we restrict our survey to English rural painters of the first rank, and put J. M. W. Turner aside as an exception, we find in their lives so much tragedy and long-suffering that it seems wrong for us to take pleasure in their work-work that brought them so little in the way of comfort and happiness. Good luck did not come to these great hearts, like the farm on the Sabine Hills to Horace. They were soldiers ever at war against adversity, making forced marches with hunger for a companion. Some died young after one sharp campaign, like Girtin, Bonington, George Mason, and Fred. Walker. Others lived to old age, and suffered much more on that account. Success and popularity came after their funerals; and then it was profitable to have a shrewd liking for their genius. Think of John Sell Cotman, one of the finest spirits in landscape art, who died miserably, worn out by money troubles which were not a bit kinder, I think, than actual starvation. At a public sale in 1834, eight years before his death, not one of his pictures fetched more than five pounds. In 1836 a masterpiece in water-colours was knocked down at eight shillings. Richard Wilson also, living between 1714 and 1782, had a desperate struggle

INTRODUCTION

all his life, fighting like a beaten general in rearguard actions. Old Crome gave lessons for a living at Norwich, in a sleepy provincial town, shut up there like an eagle in an aviary of parrots. These great men, like Linnell, Holland, David Cox, and Peter De Wint, left behind them a magnificent legacy of work, more valuable to-day than giltedged securities. The best pictures by De Wint were oil-paintings, and as they did not appeal at all to his purchasing friends, the painter made a temporary burial-place for them in his attic, where they were kept on shelves till he died in 1849. Two of the very finest were then offered as gifts to the National Gallery, but the too-admirable officials declined to receive them. At the present time these paintings are the pride of South Kensington, and their worth in money cannot be less than £20,000. One day, perhaps, the State will take notice of these matters. Copyright should be permanent, and the State ought to keep a small share in the copyright; then a percentage on all sales by auction may pass into a national fund to be re-invested year by year in modern pictures for the public galleries. Why should the dead enrich speculators of all kinds, without doing a pennyworth of good to living painters and sculptors, who suffer from neglect just like their predecessors ?

Even Constable had few friends who understood that his pictures were generously national, being as full as they could hold of English pastoral beauty. Constable, it is true, was not a master of imaginative composition in landscape, like Cotman.

His design was that of Nature, and his colour also was Nature's. He knew by heart all the rich phases of English cultivated scenery, and none could paint as he did the moist silver tones in wet fields and valleys. He brought the dew and the rain into English art, which caused old Fuseli to say that when he stood before a picture by John Constable, he wanted to open his umbrella.

The French saw the worth of Constable at once, and borrowed from him the beginnings of a new school. In England, on the other hand, figurepainters, with few exceptions, were blind to Constable's merit. There was then a widespread notion to the effect that figure-painting had a much higher rank than any form of rustic art, giving to those who followed it an ascendency over other painters, not unlike the ascendency of kings over nobles. This absurd belief was thrust upon Constable after his election as R.A. in 1829. He was then fifty-three years old. Yet, to use his own words, he was made to smart under his election. The insult came from the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, who told him he was "peculiarly fortunate" to be honoured by the Academy "at a time when there were historical painters of great merit on the list of candidates." In much the same way Temple disdained Swift ; and the superiority of Swift over Temple was not much greater, perhaps, than that of Constable over Lawrence. At all events, the generations which have passed since 1829 have found in the art of Constable better qualities than those of Lawrence;

PLATE III

HALF-TIMBERED COTTAGES AT LUDLOW

IN SALOP

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