Some of the greatest foreign masters were attracted thither, loaded with honours and even in some sort received into the nation by the titles of nobility conferred upon them. Holbein, Antonio Mor, Rubens, Van Dyck, were almost English painters during a longer or shorter period of their lives. The last-named in particular, called in England Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who mar ried the daughter of a lord and died in London, is really in virtue of the supreme elegance and aristocratic poetry of his portraits the father of the English School. He trained a few English pupils, Dobson, Jameson and the miniaturist Cooper. Nevertheless his principal imitators and successors were like himself foreigners settled in London ; the German Kneller and especially the Dutch man, Van der Faes who became in England Sir Peter Lely (1617 8o). Not until William Hogarth (1697-1764) do we find a painter truly English, indeed violently so. Van Dyck was the father of the English School and set before it an aristocratic ideal: Hogarth was a printer's son, uneducated but a curious observer of men and manners, who with his frank, robust personality and vigorous technique brought strength to the stripling's grace. His first works date from 1730. For rather more than a century England was to see a brilliant succession of geniuses, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Constable and Turner, responding to her highest aspira tions. No country has had so exclusive and strongly marked a love of the portrait. England and Holland alike were deprived of religious painting by the Reformation, and mythology met with no better fate. Scarcely any decorative painting is found and what little survives is mediocre. Holland compensated by invent ing the small genre picture, street scene or interior which she brought to an unheard of pitch of refinement. But England prac tised genre painting only from the beginning of the i9th cen tury, in imitation, moreover, of the Dutch, though diluted with sentimentality and humour in the little School of anecdotal painters, Newton, Leslie, Morland, Wilkie and Mulready. The three last named are the best, by reason of their preference for rustic scenes combined with landscape.
Now if portrait painting is one of the glories of English art, landscape is another; in both directions it rose to supreme heights. Nevertheless the current of anecdotal and sentimental painting, in spite of the many ways in which it is opposed to a strong and healthy conception of art is not so artificial in England as it would be elsewhere, in France for example. In England this sentimentality, humour, and even this rather theatrical setting interest us, not only because the artists who made themselves its interpreters were not without real pictorial qualities, but above all because we see in the very spirit, however open to criticism, of their little pictures, a sincerity springing from the depths of the national temperament and an inheritance, emasculated but in dubitable, of the great Hogarth.
The third characteristic of the English School is the moral strain emanating from the old Puritan tradition. It sometimes favours a conception of art closely akin to that of the novel, which from the 18th century onwards is so living and original a part of English literature. Sometimes it leans towards the pamphlet, which is moreover, often one of the forms of the English novel, or else towards caricature; sometimes it inspires visions by turn angelic and apocalyptic, but always with a pro found moral aim; and. finally, it sometimes results in movement, which is to all appearances entirely poetic, like that of the Pre Raphaelites, but with a poetry that is more literary than plastic and in which the idea of purification is applied almost as much to the intentions of art as to its specific processes and sensible effects. It must not be forgotten that in Protestant England preaching is not, as in the Latin countries, confined to the priests and the churches. England is a country in which at all times and in all places it is every man's duty to lecture his neighbour and preach the Gospel to him. In one or other of its forms, unknown
elsewhere and representing all that is most English in English temperament, this spirit alternating between utilitarian moralism and poetic fantasy has produced two men incontestably original in their force and singularity and quite unparalleled elsewhere: Hogarth and Blake.
Hogarth and Reynolds.—Hogarth's case is a strange one. The famous series of paintings, The Harlot's Progress (1732), The Rake's Progress (1735), and Marriage a la Mode are pictorial moralities of a kind which seems to us completely outside the domain of art ; for Hogarth considerations of morality count infinitely more than those of art and beauty. He himself tells us he creates "painted comedy" and considers it as a work "of public utility." His morality is founded on good sturdy prac tical truths and is not stirred by any breath of heroism, but he imbues it all with such verve, such powerful vitality, he parades and sets in motion before us such a gallery of types, of char acters whose blatant truthfulness hits us in the eye, that all criticism is silenced and reservations of the fastidious melt away.
This auto-didactic personage, disdainful of all culture, this Englishman who desired to be nothing more, was not without influence on the most cultured, refined, intelligent, learned and cosmopolitan of the great English painters, the instigator and first president of the Royal Academy, a great amateur and collector and perfect gentleman, and author of remarkable writings on art— Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast between two men and their works ; but it may be said that Reynolds was, in his fashion, the legitimate heir of Hogarth, not of Hogarth the moralist and satirist, but Hogarth the portrait painter. The author of Marriage a la Mode and The Shrimp Girl gave with his strong rough hands the decisive impetus to the national temperament. But what the original School thus created still needed was learning, taste and elegance to raise it to the level of its elder rivals. This youngest born had a long lee way to make up and Reynolds was the man predestined to assist it. He succeeded in giving his country's highest aspirations a mode of expression hitherto undreamed of in its perfection, a feat achieved by enabling English art to profit by the treasures of experience accumulated during centuries by the other Schools. Reynolds was never a pupil of Hogarth's, but certainly owes more to him than to the estimable Thomas Hudson (1701-79), his official master, who has no other title to fame. But his debt to the great masters of the past, Titian, Rembrandt, and even Raphael, Michelangelo and the Bolognese, not to mention Rubens and Van Dyck, is still greater. He studied them not as an amateur but as a craftsman and student of aesthetics, in order to assimilate everything in their genius and technique which might help him to endow his country with an art worthy of the other glories of England. In his writings, he evolved a doctrine of imitation, a fact with which he has sometimes been reproached, but wrongly so, since he succeeded—without perceptible effort—in making his borrowings his own and giving to a composite creation a homo geneous, personal and national character. His best paintings do not resemble the ceremonial portraits, painted according to formula yet imposing and magnificent, in which the French excel. The supremely aristocratic quality of his art was to endue all the luxury and elegance with an air of familiarity, of pleasant ease and romance. One day this man of learning seems to have forgotten all his calculations and abandoned himself to inspiration which created a masterpiece of poetic spontaneity, one of the most perfect paintings in which a great artist has enshrined his dream of woman, Nelly O'Brien.