FIELDING, COPLEY VANDYKE, was born about 1787, and belonged to a family several of the members of which were artists of greater or less ability. Copley Fielding exhibited his first pictures at the -Artists' Exhibition, Spring-Gardens, in 1810. It was by his water-colour landscapes that he first attracted notice, and though he subsequently made many attempts to achieve success as a painter in oil, it is by his paintings in water-colours that he will be remembered. Mr. Fielding began the practice of the art about the timo that Girtin and Turner had succeeded in raising the practice of water-colour painting almost to a level with that of oil-colours, and Fielding devoted himself with thorough earnestness of purpose to the new art.
From an early period in his career he became a teacher, and he had in that line an unusual measure of success, as well in the progress of his pupils as in their number and social position. His success as a teacher of course did much to secure for him a wide circle of patrons and friends, which the merits of his works effectually main tained. His course was one of steady prosperity, quite devoid of adventure. Ilia time was constantly occupied either in teaching or painting, or In those sketching excursions which were to furnish him with the materials for new pictures. For many years Mr. Fielding held the office of President of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, and his position was generally recognised as that of the head and representative of his branch of art in England ; the more readily no doubt in consequence of the estimation in which his personal as well as professional qualities were universally held. He died March 3, 1855, in his sixty-eighth year, at Worthing, Sussex, where, or at Brighton, ho had for a long period been accustomed to spend his antrimns.
Copley Fielding painted perhaps a larger number of landscapes tbau any other among his contemporaries of anything like equal standing in the art. Of course this was in a great measure owing to his remark able mechanical dexterity; to which also was unquestionably due much that was at first sight most striking and characteristic in his works. His execution' as it is technically called, was indeed very noticeable. The peculiar texture of his pictures was usually as much produced by the use of sponge and cloth as by brush or pencil; and this manipulative trickery—for in the excess to which he carried it such it eventually became—like every kind of clever charlatanism, found a body of enthusiastic admirers, and secured for his pictures eager purchasers at high prices. But it had necessarily a mischievous
influence on the painter, and, as far as his example extended, on art. Manipulative dexterity is always easier than that careful and specific imitation which is the result of continuous observation and con scientious thought : and the indulgence in any mechanical trickery inevitably leads, as was the case with Fielding in his later years, to the frequent repetition of certain peculiarities of effect, and to mannerism.
But Copley Fielding was undoubtedly one of the very best of our many admirable landscape painters in watercolours • a body of artists especially distinguished by a true and simple of natural scenery, and by a decidedly original and seltdependent study of it. His range of subjects was not very extensive, but within it he was almost unrivalled. Of our broad chalk downs, with their sunny slopes, wooded hollows, and glimpses of near or remote ocean, or the soft vapoury stretches of distant Kentish or Sussex weald, Copley Fielding may fairly be said to be the first who felt the poetry, and who perceived their exquisite adaptation to pictorial art ; and often as other artists have since essayed to represent the South Downs, lie remains as yet their only adequate painter. In depicting our English, Welsh, and Scotch mountain and lake scenery too, under certain atmospheric conditions, he was equally at borne, and so also in those combinations of river, hills, and foliage, of which his 'Bolton Abbey ' may be regarded as the representative; while his stormy marine views, though they became of late years more and more conventional, were always deeply impressive, and sometimes extremely grand. But in all there are the faults arising from insufficient study—from the excessive rapidity of production allowing scarce any subject to be fairly thought out and wrought into a finished and master-like picture. The colour, exquisite as it often is in parts, is too often crude ; the forms are unstudied, the drawing excessively loose, and the chiaroscuro con ventional. At least such, with all their brilliancy and richness of effect, is too commonly the case with his more recent pictures; many of his earlier ones are, as far as they go, among the most successful and satisfactory pictures of their class which have been produced by any painter.