Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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The first picture, with all its correctness, brightness, richness, or
delicacy it may be, remains bare, hard, and barren, compared to the
second. I cannot explain to my readers the cause of the difference, I
can Only show it to them as they may see it for themselves, and say
that I suppose it proceeds from this--that the second painter has seen
farther into the heart of nature than the first, and has been able by
subtler touches to make us see with his eyes.

But imaginative landscape is much more than this vivid feeling and
expression of nature; there is not a cloud, or leaf, or bird too many or
out of keeping with the place and the hour. The clouds are the very
clouds of sunset, or sunrise, or high noon--clouds differing widely from
each other, as you have no doubt observed. The trees are the beeches, or
chestnuts, or pines, which would grow on the conformation of rocks, in
the sheltered nook, or on the breezy upland; the birds are the linnets
or the larks, the thrushes or the lapwings, which frequent these special
trees, and may be seen and heard at this particular hour.

Again, landscape often tells a story, and tells it inimitably. My
readers have heard of the ballad of the 'Two Corbies,' which the writer
of the ballad has made to meet and tell gruesomely where and on what
carrion their feast has been. Suppose the writer of the ballad had been
a painter, he might have painted the story as intelligibly by the lone
hill-side, the bleaching bones of the faithful hound and gallant grey,
the two loathly blue-black birds satiated with their prey. There is a
significant old Scotch song with a ballad ring, by Lady Nairne, two
verses of which form each a complete picture not only of different
seasons, but of different phases of feeling--happiness and misery.

'Bonnie ran the burnie down,
Wandering and winding;
Sweetly sang the birds aboon,
Care never minding.

'But now the burn comes down apace,
Roaring and reaming,
And for the wee birdies' sang
Wild howlets screaming.'

Imagine these two verses painted, and the painter, from a lack of
comprehension, introducing the 'wild howlets screaming' _beside the
burnie_, 'wandering and winding,' and the 'wee birdies' foolishly and
inconsequently singing with their feeble song drowned in the rush of the
burn (no longer a burnie), 'roaring and reaming,' when the 'spate' is
spreading desolation on every side. Don't you see how the picture would
be spoilt, and the story of complete contrast left untold? I have taken
advisedly an extreme and, therefore an unlikely case of halting
imagination. But in imaginative landscape every 'white flower with its
purple stain,' every crushed butterfly, is made to play its part in the
whole, and at the same time due proportion is never lost sight of, and
the less is always kept subordinate to the greater.

I have already had occasion to mention examples of Nicolas Poussin in
the National Gallery and in Dulwich Gallery.

Claude Gelee, better known as Claude Lorraine, was a native of Lorraine,
and was born at Chateau de Chamagne in the Vosges, in 1600. His parents
were in humble life, and apprenticed Claude to a baker and pastry-cook.
According to some biographers the cooks of Lorraine were in such request
that they occasionally repaired to Rome with their apprentices in their
train to serve the successor of St Peter, and Claude was thus carried,
in the way of trade, to the city which might well have been the goal of
his ambition. According to other writers of art histories, Claude
abandoned the kneading-trough and the oven; and it was as a runaway
apprentice that by some occult means he reached Rome. And when he had
arrived he entered into the service of a landscape painter of good
repute, to whom he was colour-boy as well as cook. The last is the
account, so far, which Claude gave of himself to a friend, and it is
hardly likely either that he misrepresented his history, or that his
friend invented such details, though lately French authorities have
questioned the authenticity of the narrative. Claude remained for nearly
the entire remainder of a long life in Rome. He only once re-visited
France, while he was yet a young man, under thirty years of age, in 1625
or 1627. He is supposed to have painted his earliest pictures and
executed his etchings about this time, 1630 and to have painted his best
pictures fifteen years later, when he was in the maturity of his life
and powers. He was counted successful during his life time, as a
landscape painter, but did not amass a larger fortune than about two
thousand pounds.[33] He was a slow and careful painter (working a
fortnight at a picture with little apparent progress); his painstaking
work, and his custom of keeping a book, in which he verified his
pictures, are about the most that I can tell you of the habits of one of
the foreign painters, who has been most fully represented in England,
and was long in the highest favour with English lovers of art. Claude
Lorraine died at Rome in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1682.

Claude Lorraine's name has become a very vexed name with art critics.
There was a time when he had an unsurpassed reputation as a landscape
painter. The possession of a Claude was enough to confer art glory on a
country-house, and possibly for this reason England, in public and
private collections, has more 'Claudes' than are held by any other
country. But Claude's admirers, among whom Sir George Beaumont, the
great art critic of his generation, took the lead, have had their day,
and, if they have not by any means passed away, are on the wane.

The wrathful indignation of the English landscape painter, Turner, at
the praise which was so glibly lavished on Claude--an indignation that
caused Turner to bequeath two of his own landscape paintings to the
trustees of the National Gallery, on the caustic condition that they
should always be placed between the two celebrated 'Claudes,' known as
'The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' and 'The Embarkation of the Queen of
Sheba'--helped to shake the English art world's faith in its former
idol. Mr Ruskin's adoption and proclamation of Turner's opinion shook
the old faith still further. This reversal of a verdict with regard to
Claude is peculiar; it is by no means uncommon for the decision of
contemporaries to be set aside, and we shall hear of an instance
presently, in the case of the painter Le Brun. In fact, it is often
ominous with regard to a man's future fame, when he is 'cried up to the
skies' in his own day. The probability may be that his easy success has
been won by something superficial and fleeting. But Claude's great
popularity has been in another generation, and with another nation.
English taste may have been in fault; or another explanation seems
preferable--that Claude's sense of beauty was great, with all its faults
of expression, and he gave such glimpses of a beautiful world as the
gazers on his pictures were capable of receiving, which to them proved
irresistible.

While Claude adopted an original style as a landscape painter, so far as
his contemporaries were concerned, he was to such a degree self taught,
and only partially taught, that it is said he never learnt to paint
figures--those in his pictures were painted by other painters, and that
Claude even painted animals badly.

Mr Ruskin has been hard on Claude, whether justly or unjustly, I cannot
pretend to say.

The critic denies the painter not only a sense of truth in art, but all
imagination as a landscape painter 'Of men of name,' Mr Ruskin writes,
'Perhaps Claude is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly
total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much
feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of
expression.' Mr Ruskin condemns in the strongest terms 'the mourning and
murky olive browns and verdigris greens, in which Claude, with the
industry and intelligence of a Sevres china painter, drags the laborious
bramble leaves over his childish foreground.' But Mr Ruskin himself
acknowledges, with a reservation, Claude's charm in foliage, and
pronounces more conditionally his power, when it was at its best, in
skies--a region in which the greater, as well as the less, Poussin was
declared to fail signally; 'a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of
Claude,' Mr Ruskin writes, 'is indeed most perfect, and beyond praise,
in all qualities of air; though even with him I often feel rather that
there is a great deal of pleasant air between me and the firmament, than
that the firmament itself is only air.'

When all has been said that can be said, let us look at a mellow or a
sunny Claude on any wall where it may hang, and judge for ourselves of
the satisfaction it is calculated to give.

Claude was fond of painting scenes on the Tiber and in the Roman
Campagna, but while he tried to reproduce the hills and woodlands of
Italy, he did not seek to paint the mountain landscapes of the
Apennines.

Besides Claude's numerous works in England and scattered through other
countries, some of his finest paintings are in the Doria and Sciarra
palaces in Rome. He rarely put his name to his works; when he did so he
signed it frequently 'Claudio,' sometimes 'Claudius.' I have spoken of
his book of sketches, in which he had been wont to note on the back of
the sketch the date of the completed picture, and to whom sold. This
book he called the 'Libro di Verita,' or, Book of Truth, and its
apparent use was to check the sale of spurious paintings in Claude's
name, even during his lifetime. The 'Book of Truth' is in possession of
the Duke of Devonshire, and has been employed in recent years with
reference to the end for which it seemed designed, so woe to that
country-house which has long pride that 'Claude' does not happen to have
a place in the 'Book of Truth,' though I do not know that it is at all
certain that Claude took the precaution of inscribing _every_ painting
which he painted after a certain date in the 'Book of Truth.'

Claude Lorraine is well represented in the National Gallery. Engravings
of his pictures are common.

Charles le Brun was born in Paris, in 1619. He was trained to be a
painter, and went young to Rome, studying there for six years under the
guidance of Nicolas Poussin. Le Brun returned to Paris, and, through the
patronage of the Chancellor Segnier, was introduced to the court, and
got the most favourable opportunities of practising his profession with
worldly success. He speedily acquired a great name, and was appointed
painter to the King, Louis XIV. Le Brun had enough influence with his
royal master, and with the great minister Colbert, to succeed in
establishing, while the painter was yet a young man, the Royal Academy
of Art, of which he was the first member, and virtually the head,
holding, in his own person, the directorship of the Gobelin tapestry
works, which was to be the privilege of a member of the Academy. Le Brun
continued in the utmost favour with the King, who, not content with
employing the painter largely at Fontainebleau and in Versailles,
invested him with the order of St Michael, bestowed on him letters of
nobility, and visited him frequently at his work, occasions when there
were not wanting adroit courtiers to liken the Grand Monarque to the
Emperor Charles V., and Le Brun to Titian.

Le Brun seems to have been a man of energy, confidence, and industry,
neither mentally before nor after his time, and by no means too
retiring, meditative, or original, to fail to profit by his outward good
fortune. He wrote, as well as painted, artistic treatises, which were
received as oracular utterances, and entirely deferred to in the schools
of his day. He died at Paris in 1690, when he was in his seventieth
year.

Le Brun's real merits as a painter were limited to respectable abilities
and acquirements, together with florid quickness and ease, and such an
eye to what was splendid and scenic as suited admirably a decorator of
palaces in an age which prized sumptuousness, and an exaggeration of
dramatic effect, over every other quality. Nicolas Poussin's quiet
refinement of style became in Le Brun what is called academic
(conventionally learned), pompous, and grandiose, and men decidedly
preferred the degeneration. But later critics, who have not the natural
partiality of the French to the old master, return to their first loves,
and condemn Le Brun's swelling violence, both in the tints and poses of
his figures. Among his most famous works, which have been magnificently
engraved, are his 'Battles of Alexander.'

Antoine Watteau was born at Valenciennes in 1684. A very different
painter from Le Brun, he was yet as characteristic of French art in the
reign of Louis XIV. I think my readers must be familiar with his name,
and I dare say they associate it, as I do, not only with the fans which
were painted largely after his designs, but with mock pastorals and
Sevres china. I don't know if his birth-place at Valenciennes, with its
chief product of dainty lace, had anything to do with it, but the other
items of poor Watteau's history are considerably removed from the very
artificial grace which one connects with his name. He was the son of a
carpenter, and struggled up, by the hard instrumentality of third-rate
masters and of picture-dealers, to the rank which he attained among
artists, taking his stand from the first, however, as the painter of
well-bred, well-apparelled people--the frequenters of _bals masques,_
and _fetes champetres,_ who were only playing at shepherds and
shepherdesses.

Watteau was elected an Academician in 1717, when he was thirty-three
years of age, and he afterwards came to England, but did not remain
there. He died of consumption at Nogent-sur-Marne in 1721, when he was
thirty-six years of age.[34] Watteau's gifts were his grace and
brilliance on a small scale. He did not draw well; as to design, his
composition may be said to be suited to such a work as the collection of
'fashionable figures,' which he engraved and left behind him. Yet, if we
were to see at this moment some of his exquisite groups of ladies in
sacques and Watteau hats, and cavaliers in flowing wigs and lace,
cravats, I have no doubt that the most of us would admire them much, for
they are exceedingly pretty, and exceeding prettiness is attractive,
particularly to women. But I would have my readers to remember that this
art is a finical and soulless art, after all. I would fain have them
take this as their maxim, 'That the art is greatest which conveys to the
mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of
the greatest ideas.'

Jean Baptiste Greuze was born at Tournus in Burgundy in 1726. He studied
painting from his youth in the studios of artists at Lyons, Paris, and
Rome, and his studies resulted in his being a celebrated genre painter.
He only painted one historical picture, but, with the touchy vanity
which seemed natural to the man, he ranked his genre pictures as high
art; and when he was placed in the ordinary list of genre painters on
his election as a member of the French Academy of Painting, Greuze
resented the imputation, and withdrew from the Academy. He died in 1805,
aged seventy-nine years. Greuze was a showy, clever, but neither earnest
nor truthful painter of domestic subjects and family pictures. His
pictures of women and heads of girls, the expression in some of which
has been severely condemned, are among his best known works, and by
these he is represented in the National Gallery.[35]




CHAPTER XI.

HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK, 1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO,
1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723.


Hans Holbein, sometimes entitled Hans the Younger, was born at Augsburg
about 1494 or 1495. He was the son of a painter, and belonged to a
family of painters, one or more of whom had preceded Hans Holbein in
leaving Augsburg, and taking up his residence at Basle. There Holbein
was under the patronage of, and on terms of friendly intercourse with,
the great scholar Erasmus. One bad result proceeded from this friendly
familiarity, that of establishing or originating the charge that
Holbein, as a young man, at least, was coarse and dissipated in his
habits. The evidence is sufficiently curious. There is still in
existence the copy of a Latin book, called the 'Praise of Folly,'
written by Erasmus, which Holbein, not being a scholar, could not have
read for himself, but which, according to tradition, Erasmus himself,
or some other friend, read to him, while Holbein was so delighted with
the satire that he covered the margin of the book with illustrative
sketches. (The sketches remain, and are unmistakably Holbein's.)
Opposite a passage, recording the want of common sense and energy in
many learned men, Holbein had drawn the figure of a student, and written
below, '_Erasmus_.' The book coming again into the hands of Erasmus, he
was offended with the liberty taken by the painter., and sought to
retaliate in kind by writing below the sketch of a rude boor drinking,
'_Holbein_.' In spite of the rough jesting, the friendship between
scholar and painter was not interrupted.

In these early days Holbein sometimes practised painting on glass, after
the example of some of his kinsmen. At Basle, Holbein painted what is
considered his finest work, the 'Meier Madonna,' now at Darmstadt, with
a copy in the Dresden Gallery, and there he executed the designs for his
series of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death.'

At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that
the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert Duerer, was
unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her
children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he
re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with
him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the
marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which
Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle.
'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman;
another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,'
with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's
latest biographer[36] has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth
Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has
conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in
circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the
critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable
accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and
children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court
favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may
have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base
suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to
disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous
man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.

Holbein came to England about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been
thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the
house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of
introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus
to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are
so many portraits and copies of portraits of Erasmus, not only by
Holbein, but by other painters--for Erasmus was painted by Albert Duerer
and Quintin Matsys,--that this special portrait, like the true Holbein
family portrait of the More family, remains very much a subject of
speculation. Most of us must be well acquainted with the delightful
account which Erasmus gave of Sir Thomas More's country-house at
Chelsea, and the life of its occupants. It has been cited hundreds of
times as an example of what an English family has been, and what it may
be in dutiful discipline, simple industry, and high cultivation, when
Sir Thomas's young daughters repeated psalms in Latin to beguile the
time in the drudging process of churning the butter. During Holbein's
residence in or visits to the Mores' house at Chelsea, he sketched or
painted the original of the More family picture.

Holbein was introduced to Henry VIII, by Sir Thomas More, and was
immediately taken into favour by the king, and received into his
service, with a lodging in the palace, a general salary of thirty pounds
a year, and separate payment for his paintings. According to Horace
Walpole, Holbein's palace lodging was probably 'the little study called
the new library' of square glazed bricks of different colours, designed
by the painter at Whitehall. (This gateway, with the porch at Wilton,
were the painter's chief architectural achievements.) By another
statement, Holbein's house was on London Bridge, where it was destroyed
in the great fire.

I have already alluded to the anecdote of the value which Henry VIII,
put on Holbein. It was to this effect: that when an aggrieved courtier
complained to the king that the painter had taken precedence of him--a
nobleman, the king replied, 'I have many noblemen, but I have only one
Hans Holbein.' In fact, Holbein received nothing save kindness from
Henry VIII.; and for that matter, there seemed to be something in common
between bluff King Hal and the equally bluff German Hans. But on one
occasion Hans Holbein was said to have run the risk of forfeiting his
imperious master's favour by the too favourable miniature which the
painter was accused of painting of Anne of Cleves.

At Henry's court Holbein painted many a member of the royal family,
noble and knight, and English gentleman and lady. His fortune had made
him a portrait painter, but he was fully equal to other branches of art,
as shown by his 'Meier Madonna,' and still more by the designs which
have been preserved of his famous allegory of 'the Triumphs of Riches
and Poverty,' painted for the hall of the Easterling Steelyard, the
quarters of the merchants of Allemagne, then traders in London. In
addition to painting portraits Holbein designed dagger hilts, clasps,
cups, as some say after a study of the goldsmith's work of Cellini.

For a long time it was believed that Hans Holbein died after Mary Tudor
succeeded to the English throne; indeed, some said that his death had
been occasioned or hastened by that change in the affairs of men, which
compelled him to quit his lodgings in the palace to make room for 'the
new painter,' Sir Antony More, who came in the suite of Mary's
well-beloved husband, Philip of Spain. There was even a theory,
creditable to Hans Holbein, drawn from this conclusion, that he might
have adopted the Protestant views of his late gracious master, and have
stood by them stoutly, and so far forfeited all recognition from the
bitter Catholic Mary. But, unfortunately for the tradition and theory,
and for the later pictures attributed to Hans Holbein, his will has been
discovered, and that quite recently, proving, from the date of its
administration, his death of the plague (so far only the tradition had
been right), when yet only in his forty-eighth year, as early as 1543,
four years before the death of Henry VIII. In spite of court patronage
Holbein did not die a rich man, and there is an impression that he was
recklessly improvident in his habits.

Holbein had re-visited Basle several times, and the council had settled
on him a pension of fifty florins a year, provided he would return and
reside in Basle within two years, while his wife was to receive a
pension of forty florins a year during Holbein's two years' absence.
Holbein did not comply with the terms of the settlement. About the time
of his death his son Philip, then a lad of eighteen, was a goldsmith in
Paris. Of Hans Holbein's portraits I have two to draw from; one,
painted in his youth at Basle, shows the painter in an open doublet, and
curious stomacher-like shirt, and having on his head a great flapping
hat. His face is broad and smooth-skinned, with little hair seen, and
the features, the eyes especially, rather small for such an expanse of
cheek and chin. The other picture of Holbein to which I have referred
belongs certainly to a considerably later period of his life, and
represents him with short but bushy hair, and short bushy beard and
moustache, a man having a broad stout person with a mixture of
dauntlessness and _bonhommie_ in his massive face.

Mr Ruskin says of Holbein, as a painter, that he was complete in
intellect; what he saw he saw with his whole soul, and what he painted
he painted with his whole might.

In deep and reverential feeling Holbein was far behind his countryman
Albert Duerer, but Holbein was far more fully furnished than Duerer
(unless indeed as Albrecht Duerer showed himself in that last picture of
'the Apostles') in the means of his art; he was a better draughtsman in
the maturity of his powers, and a far better colourist. For Hans Holbein
was not more famous for the living truthfulness of his likenesses ('a
man very excellent in making physiognomies'), than for the 'inimitable
bloom' that he imparted to his pictures, which 'he touched, till not a
touch became discernible.' Yet beneath this bloom, along with his
truthfulness, there was a dryness and hardness in Holbein's treatment of
his subjects, and he is far below Titian, Rubens, and even Rembrandt as
a portrait painter.

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