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Tamoskaro Directory 03
Page 09
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.
The fact, of course, is that it is just the variety of experience which makes life interesting,--toil and rest, pain and relief, hope and satisfaction, danger and security,--and if we once remove the idea of vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and uninspiring affair. It is the process of change which is delightful, the finding out what we can do and what we cannot, going from ignorance to knowledge, from clumsiness to skill; even our relations with those whom we love are all bound up with the discoveries we make about them and the degree in which we can help them and affect them. What the mind instinctively dislikes is stationariness; and an existence in which there was nothing to escape from, nothing more to hope for, to learn, to desire, would be frankly unendurable.
On leaving Montrigone, with a pleasant sense of having made acquaintance with a new and, in many respects, interesting work, I could not get the sacristan and our difference of opinion out of my head. What, I asked myself, are the differences that unhappily divide Christendom, and what are those that divide Christendom from modern schools of thought, but a seeing of Joachims as the Virgin's grandmothers on a larger scale? True, we cannot call figures Joachim when we know perfectly well that they are nothing of the kind; but I registered a vow that henceforward when I called Joachims the Virgin's grandmothers I would bear more in mind than I have perhaps always hitherto done, how hard it is for those who have been taught to see them as Joachims to think of them as something different. I trust that I have not been unfaithful to this vow in the preceding article. If the reader differs from me, let me ask him to remember how hard it is for one who has got a figure well into his head as the Virgin's grandmother to see it as Joachim.
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