Gainsborough is not an impeccable draughtsman, his composi tions are not skilfully balanced like those of Reynolds, his fig ures often seem disposed haphazard on the canvas. But he has charm. He is a poet, and a poet by instinct, quivering with sensitiveness, capricious and fantastic but always natural. Al though he painted some good portraits of men he is, par excellence, the painter of women and children. A profound admirer of Van Dyck he took him for model; but this admiration does not detract from his originality, which has a unique quality of seductiveness. On Van Dyck's themes—such as that of the boy clad in costly satin, with the woman's face, long and delicate in its aristocratic grace—he composed entirely new variations, a word here employed in all the fullness of sense attributed to it by musicians. For there is music of the sweetest, most winning, most subtle kind in Gainsborough's best canvases. Almost inadvertently and with no thought except to satisfy his love of the country he is the veritable creator of the great English School of landscape painters, no less a source of glory to their native land than are her painters of portraits.
England had long shown a great love of natural beauty. Her connoisseurs had collected in their London salons and the gal leries of their country houses the works of Ruysdael, Cuyp, Canaletto, Guardi, Claude; but it was not without good rea son that no work bearing an English signature was ever seen there. It was still in imitation of Canaletto that Samuel Scott, the companion of Hogarth, painted his views of London, so precious as historical records. He was one of the founders of that Society of Water-Colour Painters which was to have such im portant developments. The real creators of English landscape, however, are Wilson and Gainsborough. Richard Wilson (1714 82) took to landscape somewhat late, having first devoted himself with success to the portrait, whereas Gainsborough, on the con trary, started as a landscape painter. If, therefore, there were a
difference of date it would tend to confirm the priority of the younger man. It was at Rome, where he lived for six years, that, encouraged by Zuccarelli and Joseph Vernet, Wilson painted his first landscapes. Having returned to England he pursued his career as a landscape painter in the Roman style, sometimes interrupting his reminiscences of Italy to paint the beauties of Wales, where he was born. In spite of a certain monotony, we must concede to Wilson's works the charm of noble serenity, especially when his wide skies shed a limpid light upon the waters of a lake surrounded by the harmonious lines of mountains. Gains borough also began by imitating the Dutch when he painted Harwich Harbour or the country around Sudbury. But from the start he announced much more clearly than Wilson the road to be followed by English landscape. His canvases, painted be tween the ages of 20 and 25 already herald Constable's earliest works. His Watering Place and Return from the Market show, together with a truth to nature altogether new at that time, a rustic poetry and a sort of moving sweetness drawn from the depths of his nature.
Of Crome's pupils, Cotman, Stark and Vincent, who continued to shed lustre on the Norwich School, the most gifted is Cotman. Simultaneously with Thomas Girtin and Cozens he brought about the revival of that water-colour painting which has assumed in England the character of a national institution.