|
|
Cornugaya Directory 06
Page 01
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition,
Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but
if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively
disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a
natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense,
he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he
fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue
Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a
composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we
meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and
grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely
successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training;
but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy
about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his
color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as
odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in
figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both
in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most
English of all the English painters--a man not yet entirely
appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in
English art.
The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It
was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it
reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth
centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local
modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the
fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its
place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church
decorations in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now
perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire,
and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the
twelfth century, and there are some remains of painting in Westminster
Abbey that are said to be of thirteenth and fourteenth-century origin.
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the English people
depended largely upon foreign painters who came and lived in England.
Mabuse, Moro, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller--all were there
at different times, in the service of royalty, and influencing such
local English painters as then lived. The outcome of missal
illumination and Holbein's example produced in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries a local school of miniature-painters of much
interest, but painting proper did not begin to rise in England until
the beginning of the eighteenth century--that century so dead in art
over all the rest of Europe.
|
