The pre-Raphaelites.—After this period, during which English painting sheds its lustre over a great part of the world, we see England withdraw within herself in an effort, very praiseworthy in the loftiness and purity of its intentions, but, in spite of a few incontestable talents, very slight in its results and adding little to the treasures of universal art. This movement must never theless have responded to some general spiritual need, for it is impossible to deny the sentimental and intellectual analogies which produced Boecklin in Germany, Gustave Moreau in France and the pre-Raphaelites in England. To a certain extent it may be said that pre-Raphaelitism is a continuation and transformation of the idealist movement, fantastic and mystic by turns, which produced at the beginning of the century Fuseli and Blake. Thomas Stothard (1755-1834), with his pictures from Shake speare and Chaucer, painted in a style imitated to some extent from mediaeval illuminations, continued this movement in his own way. A little later Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) painted his first Gothic pictures filled with an arid precision, a scrupulous attention to minute detail, a harsh colouring, in a word almost everything which was to become the rule in pre-Raphaelitism. In 1848 the new School found its name; we should rather say the new "Brotherhood," for under the influence of John Ruskin—an imperious aesthetician with a passion for French cathedrals and the quattrocento Italians, a poet in his way but impregnated with the spirit of puritan ascetism—the group assumed an almost religious character and each of its members had to append to his signature the initials P.R.B. ("Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood"). Their intention was to react against the facile frivolity of the Lawrence tradition in art, but they traced its decadence farther back to the remote effect of the academic style for which Raphael himself has to be the first to answer. There must be a return to the simplicity of the Primitives and a pious copying of nature. In spite of all this naivete to which they ardently aspired, the works of the pre-Raphaelites are everywhere filled with artificiality —and an artificiality more literary than plastic. This is not sur prising, since from the start the new school was influenced by two men of letters, the critic Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was poet and journalist before becoming a painter, and always pursued his two callings simultaneously. It was a singular fellowship which united an enthusiastic doctrinaire as uncom promising as Cromwell's Roundheads with the son of an Italian revolutionary who had taken refuge in London, a man ambitious, reckless, voluptuous, subtle and uncertain. The miracle is that from these opposing elements sprang an art profoundly English in character, and it is this which makes us to some extent indul gent of its shortcomings. The group included Holman Hunt (1827-191o), Sir John Millais (1829-96), and Burne-Jones (1833-98).
George Frederick Watts (1818-1904) who was older than the first pre-Raphaelites, and even than Ford Madox Brown, and who outlived for a considerable time the youngest disciples of the Brotherhood, had a career parallel to theirs but made no pretence of restoring the naive and scrupulous technique of the Primitives. His portraits are the best part of his work. Leighton (183o-96) and an anglicised Dutchman, Alma-Tadema (1836 1912), retain, on the other hand, some of the careful precision of the pre-Raphaelites. While Burne-Jones was still painting his reveries, other artists were attracted by new currents of thought.
Breaths of outer air were gradually changing the English atmos phere, wafted from realism, from French impressionism, and also from America. They found in England those qualities of reality and brilliance which an intervening period of idealism had for a time striven to consign to oblivion. (P. JA.) Painting in the American Colonies reflected generally the por trait styles in the mother countries, though with a tang of pro vinciality. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (New York) had its Jan Strycker and its painter families Duyckinck and Van der Lyn. Before 1730 Gustavus Hesselius, a Swede, was painting in Mary land and Jeremiah Theiis, a Swiss, was at work in South Caro lina. Peter Pelham and John Smibert came from England, and in the second quarter of the eighteenth century were painting dour portraits in Boston. These two "limners" were succeeded by Joseph Blackburn. Jeremiah Feke, a native American, realized his forms more solidly and with greater originality.
Another native American, John Singleton Copley (1737-1815), working in Boston, was responsible for the finest painting pro duced in the American colonies. His portraits are racy, original, decidedly un-European in conception.
Benjamin West (1738-182o), another important figure in the history of American painting, settled in London in 1763 and there helped to mould the styles of two generations of American painters. Among these were Charles Willson Peale, John Trum bull, John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, Samuel F. B. Morse and Rembrandt Peale. Some of their portraits have decided merit (e.g., Morse's Lafayette, in the City Hall, New York), but their pretentious historical pictures were generally unsuccess ful. An exception is Vanderlyn's Ariadne, one of the finest achievements in American figure painting.
Almost a generation older than these painters but younger than West was the portrait painter Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), who went to England in 1775 and returned to America after seventeen years. In London he appears to have spent some years in West's studio and to have been influenced by Gainsborough's work. Returned to America his style becomes highly individual, and his portraits, polite in spirit, are deft in handling and fresh in colour, the flesh having an extraordinary silvery beauty.
Other popular portrait painters were Thomas Sully (1783 1872) and John Neagle (1799-1865) in Philadelphia, and Henry Inman (1801-1846) in New York City. Sully's fluent style is based on Lawrence but he developed his own colour and handling.
Landscape painting, which became an important expression of the mild, poetic idealism of America, began about 1830 with the drab work of the indigenous Hudson River School. Out of this movement came George Inness (1825-1894). His early land scapes have a classic spaciousness which gradually gives way to a formless but effective resonance. Another painter of vague, subjective landscapes, and figures as well, was George Fuller. Others were William Morris Hunt, Elihu Vedder, John La Farge, and somewhat later Frank Duveneck and William M. Chase.
Picturesque James A. McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) went to Paris as a young man and soon settled in London. He was influ enced by Courbet and Fantin-Latour but especially by Japanese colour-prints. His paintings transform people and familiar scenes into colour harmonies of exquisite subtlety. Such portraits as those of his mother and Thomas Carlyle are masterpieces.