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Cornugaya Directory 06
In landscape the English have had something to
say peculiarly their own. It has not always been well said, the
coloring is often hot, the brush-work brittle, the attention to
detail inconsistent with the large view of nature, yet such as it is
it shows the English point of view and is valuable on that account.
Richard Wilson (1713-1782) was the first landscapist of importance,
though he was not so English in view as some others to follow. In
fact, Wilson was nurtured on Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet and
instead of painting the realistic English landscape he painted the
pseudo-Italian landscape. He began working in portraiture under the
tutorship of Wright, and achieved some success in this department; but
in 1749 he went to Italy and devoted himself wholly to landscapes.
These were of the classic type and somewhat conventional. The
composition was usually a dark foreground with trees or buildings to
right and left, an opening in the middle distance leading into the
background, and a broad expanse of sunset sky. In the foreground he
usually introduced a few figures for romantic or classic association.
Considerable elevation of theme and spirit marks most of his pictures.
There was good workmanship about the skies and the light, and an
attentive study of nature was shown throughout. His canvases did not
meet with much success at the time they were painted. In more modern
days Wilson has been ranked as the true founder of landscape in
England, and one of the most sincere of English painters.
William Blake (1757-1827) was hardly a painter at all, though he drew
and colored the strange figures of his fancy and cannot be passed over
in any history of English art. He was perhaps the most imaginative
artist of English birth, though that imagination was often disordered
and almost incoherent. He was not a correct draughtsman, a man with no
great color-sense, and a workman without technical training; and yet,
in spite of all this, he drew some figures that are almost sublime in
their sweep of power. His decorative sense in filling space with lines
is well shown in his illustrations to the Book of Job. In grace of
form and feeling of motion he was excellent. Weird and uncanny in
thought, delving into the unknown, he opened a world of mystery,
peopled with a strange Apocalyptic race, whose writhing, flowing
bodies are the epitome of graceful grandeur.
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