The eighteenth century was the great age of British painting. It was in this period that British art attained a distinct national character. In the seventeenth century, art in Britain had been dominated largely by the Flemish artist, Anthony van Dyck. In the early eighteenth century, although influenced by Continental movements, particularly by French rococo, British art began to develop nindependently. William Hogarth, born just before the turn of the century, was the first major aritst to reject foreign influence and establish a kind of art whose themes and subjects were thoroughly British. His penetrating, witty portrayal of the contemporary scene, his protest against social injustice and his attack on the vulgtarities of fashianable society make him one of the most original and significant of British artists.
Hogarth was followed by a row of illustrious painters: Thomas Cainsborough, with his lyrical landscapes, "fancy pictures" and portraits; the intellectual Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted charming society portraits and became the first president of the Royal Academy; and George Stubbs, who is only now being recognized as an artist of the greatest visual perception and sensitivity. There are many others, including Wright of Derby, Wilson, Lawrence, Ramsay, Raeburn, Romney, Wheatley, and the young Turner.
Satirical Genre Painting
William Hogarth(1697--1764)
William Hogarth was unquestionably one of the greatest of English artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. It was his achievement to give a comprehensive view of social life within the framework of moralistic and dramatic narrative. He produced portraits which brought a fresh vitality and truth into the jaded profession of what he called "phizmongering". He observed both high life and low with a keen and critical eye and his range of observation was accompanied by an exceptional capacity for dramatic composition, and in painting by a technical quality which adds beauty to pictures containing an element of satire of caricature.
A small stocky man with blunt pugnacious features and alert blue eyes, he had all the sharp-wittedness of the born Cockney and an insular pride which led to his vigorous attacks on the exaggerated respect for fereign artists and the taste of would-be connoisseurs who brought over (as he said) "shiploads of dead Christs, Madonnas and Holy Families" by inferior hands. Thereis no reason to suppose he had anything but respect for the great Italian masters, though he deliberately took a provocative attitude. What he objected to as much as anything was the absurd veneration of the darkness produced by time and varnish as well as the assumption that English painters were necessarily inferior to others. A forthrightness of statement may perhaps be related to hes North-country inheritance, for his father came to London from West-morland, but was in any case the expression of a democratic outlook and unswervingly honest intelligence.
The fact that he was apprenticed as a boy to a silver-plate engraver has a considerable bearing on Hogarth's development. It instilled a decorative sense which is never absent from his most realistic productions. It introduced him to the world of prints, after famous masters or by the satirical commentators of an earlier day. It is the engraver's sense of line coupled with a regard for the value of Rococo curvature which governs his essay on aesthetics, The Analysis of Beauty.
As a painter Hogarth may be assumed to have learned the craft in Thornhill's "academy", though his freshness of colour and feeling for the creamy substance of oil paint suggest more acquaintance than he admitted to with the technique of his French contemporaries. His first success as a painter was in the "conversation pieces" in which his bent as an artist found a logical beginning. These informal groups of family and friends surrounded by the customary necessariesof their day-to-day life were congenial in permitting him to treat a pictureas astage. He was not the inventor of the genre, which can be traced back to Dutch and Flemish art of the seventeenth century and in which he had contemporary rivals. Many were produced when he was about thirty and soon after he made his clandestine match with Thornhill's daughter in 1729, when extraefforts to gain a livelihood became necessary. With many felicities of detail and arrangement they show Hogarth still in a restrained and decorous mood. A step nearer to the comprehensive view of life was the picture of an actual stage, the scene from The Beggar's Opera with which he scored a great success about 1730, making sveral versions of the painting. Two prospects must have been revealed to him as a result, the idea of constructing his own pictorial drama comprising various scenes of social life, and that of reaching a wider public through the means of engraving. The first successful siries: "The Harlot's Progress, " of which only the engraving now exist, was immediately followed by the tremendous verve and riot of "The Rake's Progress", c. 1732; the masterpiece of the story series the "Marriage à la Mode" followed after an interval of twelve years.
As a painter of social life, Hogarth shows the benefit of the system of memory training which he made a self-discipine. London was his universe and he displayed his mastery in painting every aspect of its people and architecture, from the mansion in Arlington Street, the interior of which provided the setting for the disillusioned couple in the second scene of the "Marriage à la Mode", to the dreadful aspect of Bedlam. Yet he was not content with one line of development only and the work of his mature years takes a varied course. He could not resist the temptation to attempt a revalry with the history painters, though with little successs. The Biblical compositions for St. Bartholomew's Hospital on which he embarked after "The Rake's Progress" were not of a kind to convey his real genius. He is sometimes satirical as in "The March of the Guards towards Scotland", and the "Oh the Roast Beef of Old England!(Calais Gate)", which was a product of his single expeditionabroad with its John Bull comment on the condition of France, and also the "Election"series of 1755 with its richness of comedy. In portraiture he displays a great variety. The charm of childhood, the ability to compose a vivid group, a delightful delicacy of colour appear in the "Graham Children" of 1742. The portrait heads of his servants are penetrating studies of character. The painting of Captain Coram, the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the Foundling Hospital, adapts the formality of the ceremonial portrait to a democratic level with a singularlyengaging effects. The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to advantage in his sketches and one sketch in particular, the famous "Shrimp Girl" quickly executed with a limited range of colour, stands alone in his work, taking its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmonyof form and content, its freshness and vitality.
The genius of Hogarth is such that he is often regarded as a solitary rebel against a decaying artificiality, and yet though he had no pupils, he had contemporaries who, while of lesser stature in one way and another, tended in the same direction.
William Hogarth expressed in his art the new mood of national elation, the critical spirit of the self-confident bourgeoisie and the liberal humanitarianism of his age. He was the first native-born English painter to become a hero of the Enlightenment. One reason for his popularity was that the genius of the age found its highest expression in wit. From Molière to Votaire, from Congreve through Swift and Pope to Fielding, the literature of wit was enriched on a scale unprecedent since antiquity. The great comic writers of the century exposed folly, scarified pretension and lashed hypocrisy and cruelty.
It was the great and single-handed achievement of Hogarth to establish comedy as a category in art to be rated as highly as comedy in literature. According to the hierarchy of artistic categories that was inherited from the Renaissance, istoria, --the narrative description of elevated themes, especially from the Bible and antiquity --was the highest branch of art measured by a scale which placed low-life genre at the bottom.
Hogarth was actually sensitive to the categorical deprecation of comic art, and with his friend Henry Fielding set about a campaign to raise its standing.
In a number of works and statements Hogarth identified his cause with comic literature. In his self -portrait of 1745 the oval canvas rests on the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. Because his reasons for invoking literature were misunderstood, Hogarth exposed himself to the charge of being a "literary" artist. The legend of the literary painter can be traced back to his own age. "Other pictures we look at, "wrote Charles Lamb, "his prints we read." Some of the blame for aesthetic deprecation must be placed on the shoulders of Hogarth himself. He seems to have even encouraged an image which mystified his critics. He remarked of the connoisseurs "Because I hate them, they think I hate Titian and let them!" He outraged Horace Walpole by saying that he could paint a portrait as well as Van Dyck. He compared nature with art, to the desadvantage of the latter.
If his statements are examined carefully, it becomes apparent that he did not attack foreign art as such, that he passionately admired the Old Masters.
What manner of man was he who executed thse portraits--so various, so faithful, and so admirable? In the London National Gallery most of us have seen the best and most carefully finished series of his comic paintings, and the portrait of his own honest face, of which the bright blue eyes shine out from the canvas and give you an idea of that keen and brave look with which William Hogarth regarded the world. No man was ever less of a hero; you see him before you, and can fancy what he was --a jovial, honest London citizen, stout and sturdy; a hearly, plain-spoken man, loving his laugh, his friend, his glass, his roast-beef of Old England, and having a proper bourgeois scorn for foreign fiddlers, foregn singers, and, above all, for foreign painters, whom he held in the most amusing contempt.
Hogarth's "Portraits of Captain Coram"
Hogarth painted his portrait of Capitain Coram in 1740, and donated it the same year to the Foundling Hospital.
It was painted on Hogarth's own initiative, without having been commissioned, and was presented to a charitable institution in the making, one of whose founder members Hogarth was, and it depicts a friend of his, the prime mover of the whole undertaking. The very format of the picture shows that Hogarth was exerting all his powers to produce a masterpiece. It measures about 2.4 by 1.5 metres, the biggest portrait Hogarth ever painted.
In producing a work like this, of monumental proportions, where there was no purchaser to sistort the artist's intentions, Hogarth mst have had a definite aim or aims, and it is probable that he desired his work to express something of significance to him at this period of time.
The portrait is conceived in the great style, with foreground plus repoussoir, middle-ground, background, classical column and drapery. Coram is depicted sitting on a chair, which is placed on a platform with two steps leading up to it.
Hogarth makes use of the conventional scheme, traditional in portraits of rulers and noblemen, with its column, drapery and platform as laudatory symbols to stress the subject's dignity, a composition, which in the England of that time, was usually associated with Van Dyck's much admired but old-fashioned protraits of kings and noblemen. Hogarth's painting, with its attributes and symbols is not far removed form history painting. But the subject is a sea-captain, whose social position did not, by the fixed conventions for this category of picture, entitle him to this kind of portrayal. His relatively modest position in society is emphasized by his simple dress, a broad-coat of cloth, by the absence of the wig obligatory for every parson of standing, and by the intimace and realism with which the artist has depicted this figure with his broad, stocky body, shose short, bent legs do not reach the floor.
The mode of depiction refers back to, and creates in the beholder an expectation of a somewhat schematized and idealized manner of human portrayal. But by depicting Coram in an intimate and realistic fashion Hogarth breaks the mould. In one and the same work he has made use of the means of expression of both the great and the low style. By making apparent the low social status of his subject, Hogarth seems also to wish to breach the classic doctrine, whose scale of values provided the foundation of the theories about the division of painting into distinct categories, where the nature of the theme determined a picture's place on the scale "high" to "low".
Sir Joshua Reynolds(1723-1792)
To feel to the full the contrast between Reynolds and Hodarth, there is no better way than to look at their self-portraits. Hogarth's of 1745 in the Tate Gallery, Reynolds's of 1773 in the Royal Academy. Hogarth had a round face, with sensuous lips, and in his pictures looks you straight in face. He is accompanied by a pug-dog licking his lip and looking very much like his master. The dog sits in front of the painted oval frame in which the portrait appears--that is the Baroque trick of a picture within a picture. Reynolds scorns suck tricks. His official self-portrait shows him in an elegant pose with his glove in his hand, the body fitting nicely into the noble triangular outline which Raphael and Titian had favoured, and behind him on the right appears a bust of Michelangelo.
This portrait is clearly as programmatic as Hogarth's. Reynolds's promramme is known to us in the greatest detail. He gave altogether fifteen discourses to the students of the Academy, and they were all printed. And whereas Hogarth's Analysis of Beaty was admired by few and neglected by most--Reynolds's Discourses were international reading.
What did Reynolds plead for? His is on the whole a con sistent theory. "Study the great masters...who have stood the test of ages, " and especially "study the works to notice"; for "it is by being conversant with the invention of others that we learn to invent". Don't be "a mere copier of nature", don't "amuse mankind with the minute neatness of your imitations, endeavour to impress them by the grandeur of [...] ideas". Don't strive for "dazzling elegancies" of brushwork either, form is superior to colour, as idea is to ornament. The history painter is the painter of the highest order; for a subject ought to be "generally interesting". It is his right and duty to "deviate from vulgar and strict historical truth". So Reynolds would not have been tempted by the reporter's attitude to the painting of important con-temporary events. With such views on vulgar truth and general ideas, the portrait painter is ipso facto inferior to the history painter. Genre, and landscape and still life rank even lower. The student ought to keep his "principal attention fixed upon the higher excellencies. If you compass them, and compass nothing more, you are still first, class... You may be very imperfect, but still you are an imperfect artist of the highest order".
This is clearly a consistent theory, and it is that of the Italian and even more of the French seventeenth century. There is nothing specifically English in it. But what is eminently English about Reynolds and his Discourses is the contrast between what he preached and what he did. History painting and the Grand Manner, he told the stu-dents, is what they ought to aim at, but he was a portrait painter most exclusively, and an extremely successful one.
Reynold's "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic
Muse": the Grand Manner Taken
Seriously
For anyone coming to the painting with a fresh eye the first impression must surely be one of dignity and solem-nity. It is an impression created not only by the pose and bearing of the central figure herself, and her costume, but also by the attitude of her two shadowy attendants, by the arrangement of the figures, and by the colour. The colour must appear as one of the most remarkable features of the painting. To the casual glance the picture seems monochromatic. The dominant tone is a rich golden brown, interrupted only by the creamy areas of the face and arms and by the deep velvety shadows of the background. On closer examination a much greater variety in the colour is appar-ent, but the first impression remains valid for the painting as a unit.
The central figure sits on a thronelike chair. She does not look at the spectator but appearsan deep contemplation; her expression is one of melancholy musing. Her gestures aptly reinforce the meditative air of the head and also contribute to the regal quality of the whole figure. A great pendent cluster of pearls adorns the front of her dress. In the heavy, sweeping draperies that envelop the figure there are no frivolous elements of feminine costume to conflict with the initial effect of solemn grandeur.
In the background, dimly seen on either side of the throne, are two attendant figures. One, with lowered head and melancholy expression, holds a bloody dagger; the other, his features contorted into an expression of horror, grasps a cup. Surely these figures speak of violent events. Their presence adds a sinister impression to a picture already eavily charged with grave qualities.
At the time the portrait was painted, Sarah Siddons was in her late twenties, but she already.had a soli.d decade of acting experience behind her. She was born in 1755, the daughter of Roger Kemble, manager of an itinerant com-pany of actors. Most of her early acting experience was with her father's company touring through English provincial centres. Her reputation rose so quickly that in 1775, when she was only twenty, she was engaged by Garrick to perform at Drury Lane. But this early London adventure proved premature; she was unsuccessful and retired again to the provincial circuits, acting principally at Bath. She threw her full energies into building her repertory and perfecting her acting technique, with the result that her return to London as a tragic actress in the autumn of 1782, was one of the great sensations of theatre history. Almost overnight she found herself the unquestioned first lady of the British stage, a position she retained for thirty years. The leading intellectuals and statesmen of the day were among her most fervent admirers and were in constant attendance at her performance.
Among the intelligentsia who flocked to see the great actress and returned again and again was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the august president of the Royal Academy. He was at the time the most respected painter in England, and he also enjoyed a wide reputation as a theorist on art.
Reynolds moved with ease among the great men of his day. Mrs Siddons remarks in her memoirs: "...At his house were assembled all the good, the wise, the talented, the rank and fashion of the age."
The painting is in fact a brilliantly successful synthe-sis of images and ideas from a wide variety of sources.
The basic notion of representing Mrs Siddons in the guise of the Tragic Muse may well have been suggested to Reynolds by a poem honouring the actress and published early in 1783. The verses themselves are not distinguished, but the title and the poet's initial image of Mrs Siddons enthroned as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, may have lodged in Reynolds's memory and given the initial direction to his thinking about the portrait.
It has long been recognized that in the basic organiza-tion of the picture Reynolds had Michelangelo's prophets and sybils of the Sistine ceiling in mind. Mrs Siddons's pose'recalls that of Isaiah, and of the two attendant figures the one on the left is very closely modelled on the simi-larly placed companion of the prophet Jeremiah.
Reynolds's attitude toward this sort of borrowing from the works of other artists may seem a little strange to us today. He thought that great works of art should serve as a school to the students at the Royal Academy: "He, who borrows an idea from an ancient, or even from a modern artist not his contemporary, and so accommodates his own work, that it makes a part of it, with no seam or joining appearing, can hardly be charged with plagiarism: poets practise this kind of borrowing, without reserve. But an artist should not be content with this only; he should enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is... a perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention." From this point of view "The Tragia Muse" is a perfect illustration of Reynolds;s advice to the student.
If the arrangement of the figures in the portrait of Mrs Siddons suggests Michelangelo, other aspects of the painting, particularly the colour, the heavy shadow effects, and the actual application of the paint, are totally unlike the work of Michelangelo and suggest instead the paintings of Rembrandt.
But the amazing thing is that the finished product is in no sense a pastiche. The disparate elements have all been transformed through Reynolds's own visual imagination and have emerged as a unit in which the relationship of all the parts to one another seems not only correct but inevitable. This in itself is an achievement commanding our admiration.
In "The Tragic Muse" Reynolds achieved an air of grandeur and dignity which he and his contemporaries regarded as a prime objective of art and which no other portrait of the day embodied so successfully.
George Romney (1734-1802)
Romney is best known to the general public by facile portraits of women and children and by his many studies of Lady Hamilton, whom he delighted to portray in various historical roles, these are not however his best works. His visit to Italy at a time when New Classical movement was gaming ground made a lasting impression on him and some of his portrait groups, e. g. "The Gower Children", 1776, are composed with classical statuary in mind, particularly in the treatment of the draperies. He painted a number of impressive male portraits., and some fashionable groups of great elegance, e. g. "Sir Cristopher and Lady Sykes", 1786. His output was large,,but he never exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Romney was of an imaginative, introspective, and nervous temperament. He was attracted to literary circles and William Hayley and William Cowper were among his friends. He had aspirations to literary subjects in the Grand Manner, and, painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. His sepia drawings, mostly designs for literary and historical subjects which he never carried put, were highly prized; there is a large collection of them in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
5. 4) Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
When Gainsborough made his often-quoted remark about Reynolds, "Damn him, how various he is", he was glancing, we may suppose, at the peculiar skill by which his great rival ran the whole gamut of portrait-painting, from "mere heads" to the most elaborate poetic and allegorical fantasies. Gainsborough himself had no such variety, but painted his sitters, commonly, in their habit as they lived. Yet, in a larger sense, he was far more va-rious than Reynolds. He excelled in two distinct branches of the art, portraiture and landscape, and revealed an un-equalled success in combining the two -- that is, in adjusting the human figure to a background of natural scenery. Moreover, he excelled in conversation pieces, animal painting, seascapes, genre and even still life. Such was his peculiar variety. Gainsborough's personality was also more vivid and various than that of Sir Joshua. He was excitable, easily moved to wrath and as readily appeased, generous and friendly with all who loved music and animals and the open air. He had not Reynolds's gift of suffering fools gladly. Although he painted at court, he was not a courtly person, but preferred to associate with musicians, simple folk, and, on occasion, with cottagers. His most engaging pictures are those of persons with whom he was intimate or at ease. His grand sitters seem a little glacial, for all the perfection of the painter's technique, as though a pane of glass were between them and the artist.
The methods of the two painters are sufficiently indicated by their respective treatment of Mrs Siddons. Reynolds, when the portrait was finished, signed his name along the edge of her robe, in order to send his name "down to posterity on the hem of her garment". Gainsborough made no attempt, as he had no wish, to record the art of "Queen Sarah"; but he was interested in the woman as she rustled into his studio in her blue and white silk dress. Her hat, muff and fur delighted him, and he proceeded to paint her as though she were paying him a call. As an actress, she was one of those sitters with whom he could be informal; and while drawing her striking profile, he is said to have remarked, "Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose." The man who made such a remark was, clearly, no courtier, but a brusque and friendly being, concerned to rid his sitter of all sense of restraint. For a painter's studio is to the sitter a nerve-racking place.
Gainsborough had from the first shown peculiar skill in representing his sitters as out-of-doors, and thus uniting portraiture with landscape. In his youth he had painted a portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews sitting in a wheat-fieM - a lovely picture, fresh as the dew of morning, in which Gainsborough's two major interests seem almost equally balanced; and at the close of his career his love of scenery sometimes prevailed over his interest in human beings, and resulted not so much in a portrait as in a picture of a garden or a park, animated by gallant men and gracious women. The tendency to prefer the scenery to the persons animating it reaches a climax in the famous canvas "Ladies Walking in the Mall". It is a view of the central avenue of the Mall, near Gainsborough's residence, behind Carlton House. The identity of the fashionable ladies taking an afternoon stroll in the park is happily ignored. The rustling of the foliage is echoed, as it were, in the shimmer of the ladies' gowns, so that Horace Walpole wrote of the picture that it was "all-a-flutter, like a lady's fan". It has the delicate grace of Lancret or Pater, and betrays the painter's ingenious escape from his studio to the greenest retreat.
Joshua Reynolds
on the Art of Thomas Gainsborough
"Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes or fancy-pictures, it is difficult to determine [...] This excel-lence was his own, the result of his particular observation and taste; for this he was certainly not indebted [...] to any School; for his grace was not academical, or antique, but selected by himself from the great school of nature [...]
[...] The peculiarity of his manner or style, or we may call it - his language in which he expressed his ideas, has been considered by many, as his greatest defect. But... whether this peculiarity was a defect or not, intermixed, as it was, with great beauties, of some of which it was probably the cause, it becomes a proper subject of criticism and enquiry to a painter. [...]
[...] It is certain, that all those odd scratches and marks which, on a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures;... this chaos, this uncouth and shape-less appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect of diligence, under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence. [...]
[...] It must be allowed, that the hatching manner of Gainsborough did very much contribute to the lightness of effect which is so eminent a beauty in his pictures." [...]