Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally
unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary
habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered
severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, and
when his debts accumulated in greater proportion even than his receipts,
in place of having recourse, like Rubens, to his painting-room, Van Dyck
tried a shorter road to get rich, by following the idle example of Sir
Kenelm Digby in his pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone.

In the year of his marriage, Van Dyck re-visited Flanders, in company
with his wife, and then repaired to France, it is understood with the
intention of settling there. He was instigated to the step by his wife,
and his own ambition of rivalling Rubens' triumphs at the Luxembourg;
but the preference which the French gave to the works of their
countryman, Nicolas Poussin, roused his latent jealousy, and so
mortified him as to induce him to renounce his intention. He determined
to return to England, and was, to his credit, confirmed in his
resolution by the threatening civil war which was to shake his royal
master's throne to the foundation, rather than deterred from it.

Again in England, Van Dyck employed Sir Kenelm Digby to make an offer on
the painter's part that for eight hundred pounds he would paint the
history, and a procession of the Knights of the Garter on the walls of
the Knights' banqueting-room at Whitehall--that palace which was to
have surpassed the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Escurial, and from one
of the windows of which Charles stepped out on his scaffold. But the
proposal was rejected, and immediately afterwards the civil war broke
out, and was speedily followed by the death of Van Dyck, about a year
after his marriage, when he was a little over forty years old, at
Blackfriars, in 1641. He was buried in old St Paul's, near the tomb of
John of Gaunt. His daughter, Justiniana, was born a short time--some say
only eight days--before her father died, and was baptized on the day of
his death. Van Dyck left effects and sums due to him to the amount of
twenty thousand pounds; but the greater part of the debts were found
beyond recovery at the close of the civil war. His daughter grew up, and
married a Mr Stepney, 'who rode in King Charles's life guards.' His
widow re-married; her second husband was a Welsh knight.

Van Dyck's contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives
which are hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within
themselves, whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in
the highest excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with
himself and his calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein
showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no
means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the
persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their
countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter,
sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not
once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck
appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater
things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his
weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as
spoiled his greatest successes.

I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to
get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that
of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose,
a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse
and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is
an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare.
The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the
best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his
complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and
whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.

In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a
delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master,
both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement
which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of
conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness
and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true,
and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the
refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I.,
whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus
lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a
noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who
have maintained that Charles,--the son of a plain uncouth father, and of
a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in
his childhood a sickly rickety child,--was by no means so well endowed
in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old
gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and
lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too
large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his
mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute,
and ends by being obstinate.[45] Again, in the hands of a sitter, which
Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has
been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in
ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and
as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck
painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them
beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van
Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney--Waller's
Sacharissa,--have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their
contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.

Van Dyck certainly owed something of the charm of his pictures to the
dress of the period, with regard to which he received this credit that
'Van Dyck was the first painter who e'er put ladies' dress into a
careless romance.' But in reality never was costume better suited for a
painter like Van Dyck.

The hair in the men was allowed to flow to the shoulders or gathered in
a love knot, while the whiskers and beard formed a point. In the women
the hair was crisped in curls round the face. The ruff in men and women
had yielded to the broad, rich, falling collar, with deep scallops of
point lace. Vest and cloak were of the richest velvet or satin, or else,
on the breaking out of the civil war, men appeared in armour. The man's
hat was broad and flapping, usually turned up at one side, and having an
ostrich feather in the band; his long wide boots were of Spanish
leather, and he wore gauntlet gloves, and rich ruffles at his wrists.
The women wore hoods and mantles, short bodices, ample trains, and wide
sleeves terminating in loose ruffles at the elbow, which left half of
the arm bare. Pearl necklaces and bracelets, round feather fans, and
'knots of flowers,' were the almost universal ornaments of women.
Another ornament of both men and women, which belonged to the day, and
was very common in the quarters I have been referring to, was a
miniature enclosed in a small case of ivory or ebony, carved like a
rose, and worn on the left side in token of betrothal.[46] Van Dyck,
along with the appreciation of black draperies which he held in common
with Rubens, was specially fond of painting white or blue satin. He is
said to have used a brown preparation of pounded peach-stones for
glazing the hair in his pictures.

In the end, with all the aids that critics may have given him, and all
the faults they may find in him, Van Dyck was a great, and in the main
an earnest portrait painter. Perhaps 'Charles in white satin, just
descended from his horse,' is the best of the single portraits which
were held to be Van Dyck's forte.

I must try to give my readers some idea of Van Dyck's 'Wilton Family.'
It has been so praised, that some have said 'it might have been covered
with gold as a price to obtain it;' on the other hand, it has not
escaped censure. One critic asserts that there is no common action
uniting the figures, and that the faces are so different in
complexion--one yellow-faced boy appearing either jaundiced or burnt by
a tropical sun, that the family might have lived in different climates.

This is the story of the picture. 'Earl Philip of Pembroke having
caused his family to meet, informs them with great emotion of the
necessity of his eldest son Charles, Lord Herbert, going into the army
of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, there to acquire military honour and
experience, notwithstanding his having just married Mary, daughter of
George, Duke of Buckingham. Lord Herbert is receiving the news with
ardour, the young bride is turning aside her fair face to hide her
tears. (Charles Lord Herbert was married Christmas, 1634, went to
Florence, and died there of small pox, January, 1636.)

'In the Pembroke picture (or "Wilton Family") there are ten figures. The
Earl and Countess are seated on a dais, under a coat of arms. He wears a
great lace collar, an order on his breast, a key at his girdle, and has
great shoes with roses. She has flowing curls, hanging sleeves, arms
crossed, necklace on the bare neck. (The Countess of Pembroke was the
Earl's second wife, Anne Clifford, daughter of George, Earl of
Cumberland, the brave lady who defied Cromwell, and was fond of signing
her name with the long string of titles derived from her two husbands,
"Anne Dorset, Pembroke, Montgomery.") Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon,
is introduced with his wife, Lady Anne Sophia Herbert, daughter of Earl
Philip; they are on the Countess's left hand. The daughter-in-law, about
to be parted from her husband, stands on the lowest step of the dais;
she is elegantly dressed, with hanging sleeves knotted with bows from
shoulder to elbow. Two young men, the bridegroom and his brother, are at
their father's right hand; they wear great falling collars and cloaks.
There are three half-grown boys in tunics without collars, and great
roses in their shoes, with a dare three daughters of the family who died
in infancy.'

Van Dyck's finest sacred pictures were his early 'Crucifixion,' and a
Pieta, at Antwerp. In these he gave a promise of nobler and deeper
pathos than he afterwards fulfilled. His pictures are to be found
freely, as I have written, in old English mansions, such as Arundel and
Alnwick Castles, Knowsley, Knole, Petworth, etc. A head said to be by
Van Dyck is in the National Gallery.

Van Dyck had few pupils: one, an Englishman named Dobson, earned an
honourable reputation as a painter.

From Sir Antony More's time down to that of Leily and Kneller, the rage
for portraits was continually increasing, and took largely the form of
miniatures, which were painted chiefly by foreigners; notably by
Hilliard and two Olivers or Oliviers, a father and son of French
extraction, and by a Swiss named Petitot. A collection of miniatures by
the Oliviers, including no less than six of Venitia, Lady Digby, had a
similar fate to that of Holbein's drawings. The miniatures had been
packed in a wainscot box and conveyed to the country-house in Wales of
Mr Watkin Williams, who was a descendant of the Digby family. In course
of time the box with its contents, doubtless forgotten, had been
transferred to a garret, where it had lain undiscovered for, it has been
supposed, fully a hundred years. It was two hundred years after the
date of the painting of the miniatures, that on some turning over of the
lumber in the garret, the exquisite miniatures, fresh as on the day when
they were painted, were accidentally brought to light.[47]

Sir Peter Lely was born in Westphalia in 1618. His real name was Vander
Facs, and his father was a 'Captain of Foot,' who, having chanced to be
born in rooms over a perfumer's shop which bore the sign of a lily, took
fantastically enough the name of Du Lys, or Lely, which he transmitted
to his son. Sir Peter Lely, after studying in a studio at Haarlem, came
to England when he was twenty-three years of age, in 1641, and set
himself to copy the pictures of Van Dyck, who died in the year of Lely's
arrival in England, and whom he succeeded as court painter. Lely was
knighted by Charles II., married an English woman, and had a son and a
daughter, who died young. He made a large fortune, dying at last of
apoplexy, with which he was seized as he was painting the Duchess of
Somerset, when he was sixty-two years of age, in 1680.

With regard to Lely's character, we may safely judge from his works that
he was such a man as Samuel Pepys, 'of easy virtue,' a man holding a low
enough standard by which to measure himself and others. Mr Palgrave
quotes from Mr Leslie the following characteristic anecdote of Lely,
which seems to prove that he was aware of, and coolly accepted, the
decline of art in his generation and person. A nobleman said to Lely,
'How is it that you have so great a reputation, when you know, as well
as I do, that you are no painter?' 'True, but I am the best you have,'
was the answer. Lely's punishment followed him into his art, for
beginning by copying Van Dyck, it is said of Lely that he degenerated in
his work till it bore the very 'stamp of the depravity of the age.'

Lely's sitters were mostly women. Among them was one who deserved a
fitter painter, Mistress Anne Killigrew, Dryden's--

'Youngest virgin daughter of the skies.'

In Lely's portrait of her, she is a neat, slightly prim, delicate
beauty, with very fine features, and such sleepy eyes, as were probably
the gift of Lely, since he has bestowed them generally on the women whom
he painted. Mistress Anne Killigrew's hair is in curls, piled up in
front, but hanging down loosely behind. Her bodice is gathered together
by a brooch, and she has another brooch on one shoulder. She wears a
light pearl necklace, and 'drops' shaped like shamrocks in her ears.

Lely painted both Charles I, and Cromwell, who desired his painters to
omit 'no pimple or wart,' but to paint his face as they saw it.

Among less notable personages Lely painted Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and
his rough Duchess, once a camp follower, according to popular rumour,
and named familiarly by the contemptuous wits of the day 'Nan Clarges.'
It is with not more honourable originals than poor 'Nan Clarges' that
Lely's name as a painter is chiefly associated. We know what an evil
time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to
immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the
generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures
hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no
good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty
detestable.

At Hampton Court also there are several of the eleven portraits of
Admirals whom Lely painted for James II, when Duke of York.

Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, incorrectly Canaletti, was born at
Venice in 1697. He was the son of a scene painter at the theatre. In his
youth he worked under his father; a little later he went to Rome, and
studied for some time there. Then he came to England, where he remained
only for two years. I have hesitated about placing his name among those
of the foreign painters resident in England, but so many of his works
are in this country that he seems to belong to it in an additional
sense. He is said to have 'made many pictures and much money.' He died
at Venice when he was seventy years of age, in 1768. As a painter he
was famous for his correctness of perspective and precision of outline
(in which it is alleged he aided himself by the use of the camera),
qualities specially valuable in the architectural subjects of which he
was fond, drawing them principally from his native Venice. But his very
excellence was mechanical, and he showed so little originality or, for
that matter, fidelity of genius, that he painted his landscapes in
invariable sunshine.

* * * * *

The great wood-carver Grinling Gibbons deserves mention among the
artists of this date. He was a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in
1648. He came to London with other carvers the year after the great fire
of London, and was introduced by Evelyn to Charles II., who took him
into his employment. 'Gibbons was appointed master carver in wood to
George I., with a salary of eighteen-pence a day.' He died at his house
in Bow Street in the sixty-third year of his age, in 1721. It is said
that no man before Gibbons 'gave to wood the lightness of flowers.' For
the great houses of Burghley, Petworth, and Chatsworth, Gibbons carved
exquisite work, in festoons for screens, and chimney-pieces, and panels
for pictures, of fruit, flowers, shells, and birds.

* * * * *

Sir Godfrey Kneller was born at Luebeck in 1646, and was the son of an
architect. He is said to have studied under Rembrandt; but if this be
true, it must have been in Kneller's early youth. It is more certain
that he travelled in Italy and returned to settle in Hamburg, but
changing his plans, he came to England, when he was about thirty years
of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with
great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if
with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait.
Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian
himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to
paint--not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in
addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter
of Russia.

William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the
painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his
conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled
more in his conversation than in any originality of observation
displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite
qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or
slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with
an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be
right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to
undertake the wigs, draperies, etc. etc., the amount of work in portrait
painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He
attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman,
but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of
Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year,
in 1723.

As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing,
and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry
of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely
painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of
execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the
better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when
Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden,
Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most
famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted
originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat
club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from
the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which
bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by
Kneller are what ought to be, in their designation, the Hampton Court
Beauties. These are still, like the other 'Beauties,' at Hampton. The
second series was proposed by William's Queen Mary, and included
herself, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary Bentinck. To
Sarah Jennings men did award the palm of beauty, but poor Queen Mary,
who had a modest, simple, comely, English face as a princess, had lost
her fresh youthful charm by the time she became Queen of England, and
was still further disfigured by the swelling of the face to which she
was liable. Her proposal to substitute the worthier women of her court
for the unworthy beauties of her uncle King Charles' court was not
relished, and helped to render Mary unpopular--among the women, at
least, of her nobility. Neither was Sir Godfrey Kneller qualified to
enhance the attractions of Mary's maids of honour and ladies in waiting,
who, to complete their disadvantages, lived at a period when it had
become the fashion for women to crown their persons by an erection on
their natural heads of artificial 'edifices of three heads.'

To Kneller, as I have already written, we owe the preservation of
Raphael's cartoons.




CHAPTER XII.[48]

ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES--TADDEO
GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO, 1412-1469--BENOZZO
GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO, 1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND
PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI--FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN
1460--ANTONELLA DA MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE,
1496--GAROPALO, 1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO
HAVE DIED ABOUT 1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO
SPAGNA, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS
BORDONE, 1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO,
1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO, 1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO,
1592-1666--ALBANO, 1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1685--VASARI,
1513-1574--SOFONISBA ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1620--LAVINIA FONTANA,
1552-1614.


Taddeo Gaddi, the most important of Giotto's scholars, was born in 1300,
and was held at the baptismal font by Giotto himself. Gaddi rather went
back on earlier traditions and faults. His excellence lay in his purity
and simplicity of feeling. His finest pictures are from the life of the
Virgin, in S. Croce, Florence. He was, like his master, a great
architect as well as painter. He furnished the plans for the Ponte
Vecchio and Campanile, Florence, after Giotto's death. He was possessed
of great activity and industry. He is supposed to have died in 1366, and
rests in the scene of his labours, since he was buried in the cloisters
of S. Croce.

Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, a Carmelite friar. The romantic, scandalous
life, including his slavery in Barbary, attributed to him by Vasari, the
great biographer of the early Italian painters, has received no
corroboration from modern researches. It is rather refuted. He always
signed his pictures 'Frater Filippus,' and his death is entered in the
register of the Carmine convent as that of 'Frater Filippus.' In all
probability he was from first to last a monk, and not a disreputable
one. He describes himself as the poorest friar in Florence, with six
marriageable nieces dependent on him, and he is said to have been
involved in debt.

His colouring was 'golden and broad,' in anticipation of that of Titian;
his draperies were fine. He was wanting in the ideal, but full of human
feeling, which was apt to get rude and boisterous; his angels were 'like
great high-spirited boys.' Withal, his style of composition was stately.
Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John
the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel
pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette[49] pictures by Fra
Filippo in the National Gallery.

Benozzo Gozzoli, 1424-1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling
him only in light and cheerful colouring. He is said to have been the
first Italian painter smitten with the beauty of the natural world. He
was the first to create rich landscape backgrounds, and he enlivened
his landscapes with animals. He displayed a fine fancy for architectural
effects, introducing into his pictures open porticoes, arcades,
balconies, and galleries. He liked to have subsidiary groups and circles
of spectators about his principal figures. In these groups he introduced
portraits of his contemporaries, true to nature and full of expression
and delicate feeling. His best work is in the Campo Santo, Pisa, scenes
from the history of the Old Testament, ranging from Noah to the Queen of
Sheba. The Pisans were so pleased with his work as to present him, in
1478, with a sarcophagus intended to contain his remains when they
should be deposited in the Campo Santo. He survived the gift eighteen
years, dying in 1496. His easel pictures are rare, and do not offer good
representations of the master. There is one in the National Gallery--a
Virgin and Child, with saints and angels.

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