John Brett, Vale of Aosta, 1858.

Oil on canvas, 87.6 x 68 cm. Private collection.

 

 

There is, however, an English artist who is perhaps more essentially English than either of the last mentioned. I mean Edwin Edwards, who is so well known and so highly honoured in France. His pictures of seaside villages, cliffs, harbours, and forest-glades are masterpieces which combine daring simplicity of composition with extraordinary knowledge of drawing.

I know nothing which appeals to one with such intense reality as his little country towns, with their high street in the foreground and the sea behind; his harbours, with their great ships riding at anchor; or his parks in winter, with their sturdy trees, the branches of which make filigree patterns against a snowy sky. I forgot to mention that Edwards is an etcher, and not a painter; but, of course, every lover of art knows this. No other artist in the English school, except Frederick Walker, can invest reality with such an aspect of greatness.

A prominent place among the landscape painters of today must be assigned to R.W. Macbeth, a young master of the Scottish school. He is most successful in representing such rustic scenes as the Potato Harvest in the Fens and the Return from St Ives Market, while his pictures of fishing villages are admirable. He has also won considerable distinction by his etchings.

The sight of active life has something in common with our inward impulses, with the law of our being, and therefore never fails to create an agreeable sensation in us. Although the movement may be unintelligible to us from many points of view, we generally quit it with better powers of sympathy and energy, a lighter heart, and a strengthened mind.

In this beautiful thought of a philosopher and true lover of nature, one who, in addition to his keen powers of observation, possesses the serious views of a moralist, we find the explanation and justification of the sympathy for landscape which exists in the people of our time, I will say more – Jules Levallois who in writing these few lines, referred only to Nature herself, has in them clearly and distinctly demonstrated the high morality of Art.

 

 

Genre Painting

 

English artists are generally censured by their critics for leaving unnoticed great historical events of the time, and devoting themselves to familiar street scenes and homely incidents. The general taste of the school has certainly run in this direction since the days of Wilkie and Leslie, but we cannot join in the accompanying reproach.

In remarking the frequent representations among English pictures of bustling railway stations and racecourses, we must bear in mind how largely such excitement and activity enters into the life of the nation. And added to this, we gain a very perfect idea of ordinary home-life from the works of British artists. They do not even content themselves with constantly portraying family customs and manners, but go beyond this by striving to show the character of the person from the expression of the face. Their pictures often possess no other aim than that of admitting the spectator to the innermost soul and private thoughts of their individuals. Surely this is, in itself, a noble effort. All these artists, with very few exceptions, interest themselves in portraying the varied play of the human countenance. Unlike the Continental schools, they, as a rule, trouble themselves little about arrangement, drawing, or colouring, and, in their genre pictures, the interest attaching the subject and the expression are all that they study. Some of these painters prefer to draw their scenes from contemporary life, whilst others borrow subjects from history or fiction.

Erskine Nicol, who belongs to the Scottish school, ranks among the very highest. He throws a singular asperity and vividness of fancy into his pictures, the scenes of whichare usually laid in unhappy Ireland. Two of these are particularly striking – The Rent Day and Both Puzzled. The latter represents a lowly, slovenly village-school. The master, poor wretch, whose moroseness equals his ignorance, fixes his stern and distrustful eye on one of his victims, an exceptional pupil. The child has just applied to him for the meaning of some word or phrase which he is quite unable to give. As bewildered as the boy, the angry schoolmaster fancies he has been caught in a trap. This unpleasant thirst for knowledge which he finds himself unable to satisfy is excessively distasteful to him, and it is much to be feared that the birch-rod will settle the matter, and extricate them from this position in which they are “both perplexed”.

The Rent Day is like a page from one of Balzac’s works, one of those many scenes in our hard modern society, when Fortune’s favoured few in their haughty insolence take pleasure in exposing to public gaze the hidden wounds and humiliations of those on whom she frowns. The nobleman’s steward is going the rounds with his subordinate to collect the rents of the large estate. As impassive as instruments of torture, these jacks-in-office receive with superb indifference the banknotes of one, the crowns and shillings so hardly scraped together of another; they turn a wilfully deaf ear to the excuses and pleadings of the poor widow for a little delay, and, utterly regardless of the lowly reverences and salutations of the poor people who have already paid their debt, they think of nothing further than of obtaining the due amount, and use their sharp eyes merely for scrutinising the banknotes. At first sight one is most struck with the comical side of this picture.

It is amusing to see the play of the different countenances, the attitudes assumed by these poor beggars, and the haughtiness of the collectors; the dilapidated hats, with their dirty rims, and the threadbare patched coats, are inimitable. On closer observation it will be seen that the artist has been equally successful with the mental deformity of the scene, and that the outward state of circumstances is a fitting emblem of the soul’s impurity. Like Pierre Beaumarchais’ Figaro, one laughs at it for fear that one may weep.

Besides having worthily carried out his idea, the painter, in spite of some harshness of tone, possesses the exceptional merit, for an Englishman, of being a true artist and skilful in colouring. Those eccentricities of composition, which are so frequent in English painting, are happily absent in Nicol’s works.

The most observable feature in Henry O’Neil’s picture Eastward Ho! is his utter disregard of arrangement and balance in the crowds of persons composing his subject. The scene takes place on the steps of a man-of-war, of which the gigantic tarred sides form the foreground of the painting. The deck is thronged with soldiers, who have been allowed, up to the last moment, to receive their friends on board, many of whom they will never meet again.

But now the word has been given and the final parting must be made. Mothers, wives, and sweethearts linger weeping on the steps; one more kiss is snatched; one more shake of the hand is exchanged, and the last tearful greeting is uttered by look or voice – it was a happy idea of O’Neil’s to place the figures in an elevated position. In this way, their gestures, as they stand on different degrees of the steps, arc much more naturally and wonderfully lifelike, correct in expression.