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| British painting in the 17-18th centuries (Британская живопись 17-18 вв.)p> The mode of depiction refers back to , and creates in the beholder an expectation of a somewhat schematized and idealized manner of human portrayal. But by depicting Coram in an intimate and realistic fashion Hogarth breaks the mould. In one and the same work he has made use of the means of expression of both the great and the low style. By making apparent the low social status of his subject, Hogarth seems also to wish to breach the classic doctrine, whose scale of values provided the foundation of the theories about the division of painting into distinct categories, where the nature of the theme determined a picture's place on the scale "high" to "low". 5.2) Sir Joshua Reynolds(1723-1792) To feel to the full the contrast between Reynolds and Hodarth, there is no better way than to look at their self-portraits. Hogarth's of 1745 in the Tate Gallery, Reynolds's of 1773 in the Royal Academy. Hogarth had a round face, with sensuous lips, and in his pictures looks you straight in face. He is accompanied by a pug-dog licking his lip and looking very much like his master. The dog sits in front of the painted oval frame in which the portrait appears--that is the Baroque trick of a picture within a picture. Reynolds scorns suck tricks. His official self-portrait shows him in an elegant pose with his glove in his hand, the body fitting nicely into the noble triangular outline which Raphael and Titian had favoured, and behind him on the right appears a bust of Michelangelo. This portrait is clearly as programmatic as Hogarth's. Reynolds's promramme is known to us in the greatest detail. He gave altogether fifteen discourses to the students of the Academy, and they were all printed. And whereas Hogarth's Analysis of Beaty was admired by few and neglected by most--Reynolds's Discourses were international reading. What did Reynolds plead for? His is on the whole a con sistent
theory. "Study the great masters...who have stood the test of ages, " and
especially "study the works to notice"; for "it is by being conversant with
the invention of others that we learn to invent". Don't be "a mere copier
of nature", don't "amuse mankind with the minute neatness of your
imitations, endeavour to impress them by the grandeur of [...] ideas". This is clearly a consistent theory, and it is that of the Italian and even more of the French seventeenth century. There is nothing specifically English in it. But what is eminently English about Reynolds and his Discourses is the contrast between what he preached and what he did. History painting and the Grand Manner, he told the stu-dents, is what they ought to aim at, but he was a portrait painter most exclusively, and an extremely successful one. Reynold's "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse": the Grand Manner Taken Seriously For anyone coming to the painting with a fresh eye the first impression must surely be one of dignity and solem-nity. It is an impression created not only by the pose and bearing of the central figure herself, and her costume, but also by the attitude of her two shadowy attendants, by the arrangement of the figures, and by the colour. The colour must appear as one of the most remarkable features of the painting. The central figure sits on a thronelike chair. She does not look at the spectator but appearsan deep contemplation; her expression is one of melancholy musing. Her gestures aptly reinforce the meditative air of the head and also contribute to the regal quality of the whole figure. A great pendent cluster of pearls adorns the front of her dress. In the heavy, sweeping draperies that envelop the figure there are no frivolous elements of feminine costume to conflict with the initial effect of solemn grandeur. In the background, dimly seen on either side of the throne, are two attendant figures. One, with lowered head and melancholy expression, holds a bloody dagger; the other, his features contorted into an expression of horror, grasps a cup. Surely these figures speak of violent events. Their presence adds a sinister impression to a picture already eavily charged with grave qualities. At the time the portrait was painted, Sarah Siddons was in her late twenties, but she already.had a soli.d decade of acting experience behind her. She was born in 1755, the daughter of Roger Kemble, manager of an itinerant com-pany of actors. Most of her early acting experience was with her father's company touring through English provincial centres. Her reputation rose so quickly that in 1775, when she was only twenty, she was engaged by Garrick to perform at Drury Lane. But this early London adventure proved premature; she was unsuccessful and retired again to the provincial circuits, acting principally at Bath. She threw her full energies into building her repertory and perfecting her acting technique, with the result that her return to London as a tragic actress in the autumn of 1782, was one of the great sensations of theatre history. Almost overnight she found herself the unquestioned first lady of the British stage, a position she retained for thirty years. The leading intellectuals and statesmen of the day were among her most fervent admirers and were in constant attendance at her performance. Among the intelligentsia who flocked to see the great actress and returned again and again was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the august president of the Royal Academy. He was at the time the most respected painter in Reynolds moved with ease among the great men of his day. Mrs Siddons remarks in her memoirs: "...At his house were assembled all the good, the wise, the talented, the rank and fashion of the age." The painting is in fact a brilliantly successful synthe-sis of images and ideas from a wide variety of sources. The basic notion of representing Mrs Siddons in the guise of the It has long been recognized that in the basic organiza-tion of the picture Reynolds had Michelangelo's prophets and sybils of the Sistine ceiling in mind. Mrs Siddons's pose'recalls that of Isaiah, and of the two attendant figures the one on the left is very closely modelled on the simi-larly placed companion of the prophet Jeremiah. Reynolds's attitude toward this sort of borrowing from the works of other artists may seem a little strange to us today. He thought that great works of art should serve as a school to the students at the Royal If the arrangement of the figures in the portrait of Mrs Siddons suggests Michelangelo, other aspects of the painting, particularly the colour, the heavy shadow effects, and the actual application of the paint, are totally unlike the work of Michelangelo and suggest instead the paintings of Rembrandt. But the amazing thing is that the finished product is in no sense a
pastiche. The disparate elements have all been transformed through In "The Tragic Muse" Reynolds achieved an air of grandeur and dignity which he and his contemporaries regarded as a prime objective of art and which no other portrait of the day embodied so successfully. 5.3) George Romney (1734-1802) Romney is best known to the general public by facile portraits of women and children and by his many studies of Lady Hamilton, whom he delighted to portray in various historical roles, these are not however his best works. His visit to Italy at a time when New Classical movement was gaming ground made a lasting impression on him and some of his portrait groups, e. g. "The Gower Children", 1776, are composed with classical statuary in mind, particularly in the treatment of the draperies. He painted a number of impressive male portraits., and some fashionable groups of great elegance, e. g. "Sir Cristopher and Lady Sykes", 1786. His output was large,,but he never exhibited at the Royal Academy. Romney was of an imaginative, introspective, and nervous temperament. 5.4) Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) When Gainsborough made his often-quoted remark about Reynolds, "Damn
him, how various he is", he was glancing, we may suppose, at the peculiar
skill by which his great rival ran the whole gamut of portrait-painting,
from "mere heads" to the most elaborate poetic and allegorical fantasies. The methods of the two painters are sufficiently indicated by their respective treatment of Mrs Siddons. Reynolds, when the portrait was finished, signed his name along the edge of her robe, in order to send his name "down to posterity on the hem of her garment". Gainsborough made no attempt, as he had no wish, to record the art of "Queen Sarah"; but he was interested in the woman as she rustled into his studio in her blue and white silk dress. Her hat, muff and fur delighted him, and he proceeded to paint her as though she were paying him a call. As an actress, she was one of those sitters with whom he could be informal; and while drawing her striking profile, he is said to have remarked, "Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose." The man who made such a remark was, clearly, no courtier, but a brusque and friendly being, concerned to rid his sitter of all sense of restraint. For a painter's studio is to the sitter a nerve- racking place. Gainsborough had from the first shown peculiar skill in representing his sitters as out-of-doors, and thus uniting portraiture with landscape. Joshua Reynolds on the Art of Thomas Gainsborough "Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes or fancy-pictures, it is difficult to determine [...] This excel-lence was his own, the result of his particular observation and taste; for this he was certainly not indebted [...] to any School; for his grace was not academical, or antique, but selected by himself from the great school of nature [...] [...] The peculiarity of his manner or style, or we may call it - his language in which he expressed his ideas, has been considered by many, as his greatest defect. But... whether this peculiarity was a defect or not, intermixed, as it was, with great beauties, of some of which it was probably the cause, it becomes a proper subject of criticism and enquiry to a painter. [...] [...] It is certain, that all those odd scratches and marks which, on a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures; ... this chaos, this uncouth and shape-less appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect of diligence, under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence. [...] [...] It must be allowed, that the hatching manner of Gainsborough did very much contribute to the lightness of effect which is so eminent a beauty in his pictures." [...] 6) Eighteenth Century Lanscape By the time of Hogarth's death in 1764, a new genera-tion had already
established itself in London, with a new kind of art and a new attitude to
art. By 1750, a number of native-born artists were making very fair The best landscapes painted in England at the closje of the
seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centu-ries were
topographical in nature. In marine painting the leading figure was Samuel Scott, following close in Canaletto's footsteps in his views of London, caught perhaps more of the veil of moisture that is almost always in English skies. But Scott lacked the Venetian's spaciousness and the logic of picture-making. Richard Wilson (1714-1782) developed a stronger, more severe style, in which the classic inspiration of the two French masters of the Italian landscape, Claude and GaspardPoussin, is very clear; as also, rather later, is that'of "the broad shimmering golden visions of the Dutchman, Cuyp. Wilson's English work of the sixties and seventies, more various than
is often thought, is at its best of a calm, sunbasking, poetic distinction;
to the English landscape he transferred something of the miraculously lucid The most remarkable of Gainsborough's landscapes have, in fact, only found a full appreciation this century. These are very early landscapes, painted in Suffolk about 1750; strictly they are not pure landscapes as they include portraits, but the synthesis of the two genres is so perfect that the pictures become portraits of more than a person - of a whole way of life, of a country gentry blooming modestly and naturally among their woods and fields, their parks and lakes. The directness of characterization is so traightforward as to seem almost naive. The light on land and tree and water has a rainwashed brilliance, and a strange tension of stillness - sometimes it is almost a thunderlight. In his later pure landscapes, the woodenness melts under the brush of a painter who loved the radiant shimmering fluency of his medium as perhaps no other English painter has ever done. Wilson and Gainsborough form the two main peaks in eighteenth century landscape painting. Gainsborough's Landscapes As a landscape painter Gainsborough was influenced in his early years by Dutch seventeenth century pictures seen in East Anglia; and the landscape backgrounds in his Ipswich period portraits are all in that tradition. But during his Bath period he saw paintings by Rubens and thereafter that influence is apparent in his landscape compositions. The landscapes of Gainsborough's maturity have spontaneity deriving from the light rapid movement of his brush;- but they are not rapid sketches from nature, he never painted out-of-doors; he painted his landscapes in his studio from his drawings, and from the scenes which , he constructed in a kind of model theatre, where he took bits of cork and vegetables and so on and moved them about, and moved the light about, till he had arranged a composi-tion. It is possible that some of his preliminary black and white chalk landscape drawings were done out-of-doors; but the majority were done in the studio from memory when he returned from his walk or ride; and some of the finest of the drawings, the "Horses by a Shed", for example, resulted perhaps from a combination of the two procedures - a rough pencil note made on the spot and reconsidered in terms of composition with the aid of his candle and the model theatre after dinner. At his highest level he went far beyond the current formulae and achieved a degree of integrated three-dimensional arrangement. Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers" Probably the most lasting impression made on many people by Richard Richard Wilson himself had never seen this view any more than we have, because it does not exist. It was for him, as it is for us, an ideal landscape, sensitively developed in his imagination from his recollections of things encountered, both in nature and in art. It was an attitude that was widely accepted in Wilson's day. The artistic climate that produced a painting such as "River Scene with Bathers" is akin to that which accounts for "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse". Underlying the interest in creating an "ideal" landscape was the
assumption that art should aspire to something more than mere sensuous
gratification; that it should elevate the thoughts of the spectator and
purge his mind of petty considerations. This was to be achieved both by
what was included and (equally important) the way in which it was
represented. The scene, with its ruin, spacious vista, and warm summer
light, is meant to remind us of Italy, or at least the Mediterranean area,
and to arouse by association a train of thought concerned with pastoral
idylls of the classical past. But this effect is strongly supported by the
way in which Wilson has organized the elements in his painting to sustain a
mood of quiet and repose. The picture is carefully balanced around the
centrally placed ruin. The hill to the right finds just the proper counter-
poise in the distant mountain and the broad stretch of valley to the left. 7) SCIENCE AND ANIMAL PAINTING Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) and George Stubbs (1724-1806) A most interesting figure was Joseph Wright of Derby, an able enough painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was conventionally London- trained in portraiture, and made the, by then, conventionally necessary trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he returned in the end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed, practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn'of the Industrial The "Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump", painted in 1768, is
perhaps his masterpiece. Air-pumps were in considerable production in the This is a picture that exists on many levels but, as it was not
expressed in terms of the classical culture of the age, Wright's subject
pictures were for long not given their due. He himself stood apart from
that (classical) culture; although he early became an associate of the George Stubbs presents in some ways a similar case: he never became a
full member of the Royal Academy. He was, for his contemporaries, a mere
horse-painter. In the last few years he has been much studied, and his
reassess-ment has lifted him to the level of the greatest of his'time. His
life has been fairly described as heroic. The son of a Liverpool currier,
he supported himself at the begin-ning of his career" in northern England
by painting por-traits, but at the same time started on his study of
anatomy, animal and human, that was to prove not only vitally im-portant to
his art but also a new contribution to science. Stubbs was one of the
great English empiricists. He took a farm-house in Lincolnshire and in it,
over eighteen months, he grappled with the anatomy of the horse. His models
were the decaying carcasses of horses, which he gradually stripped down,
recording each revelation of anatoT my in precise and scientific drawing. All his painting is based on knowledge drawn from ruthless study, ordered by a most precise observation. In the seventies, his scientific interests widened from anatomy to chemistry, and helped by Wedgwood, the enlightened founder of the great pottery firm, he experimented in enam) el painting. His true and great originality was not on-conventional lines, and could not be grasped by contemporary taste.
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