Introduction, "in the Royal portraits, and, in their own degree, in those of every cavalier and lady who sat to him, was, of course, that of rhetoric." Though it is dangerous to illustrate one art by another, the term "rhetoric " will serve well enough for the transfiguring process of portraiture. As the orator and the historian oloak the poverty of their subject or of their knowledge with ornaments of phrase and thought, so the painters of portraits convey to their sitters by the rhetorical flourish of their brush a grandeur and eloquence which are not always theirs. If you compare the pictures of Charles I. painted by Mytens with the masterpieces of Van Dyck, Van Dyck, you will instantly understand the complete "transformation" which an artist with a sense of grandiosity may achieve. "In the portraits of Mytens," says the biographer of Van Dyck, "Charles appears no doubt as he was seen, his short stature and other minor defects being in no way disguised. . . . But with the arrival of Van Dyck the King appears as it were transformed. Instead of the rather gawky youth depicted by Mytens, there appears a hero of romance with an indefinable look of destiny and sadness in his eyes." In other words, Van Dyck, in piercing the mystery of Charles's character, oharacter, seems to have had a foreknowledge of what was in store for him. He is no awkward pedant who stands before us, but kingship made visible, a monarch for whom men would die, ... and who himself was ready to lay his head upon the block rather than surrender a jot of the right which he deemed divine. And since Charles, for good or evil, was an idealist always, it may be that Van. Dyck approached nearer to the man, even though certain defects escaped him, than the prosaic Mytens. At any rate, it is not too much to say that the genius of Van Dyck has coloured for ever the history of the most unhappy of the Stuarts. Charles and his Queen will never lose the air of demure dignity which Van Dyck has given them. It is through the painter's eyes that we regard their lineaments and their characters. In truth, the originals have ceased to be, and it is by their noble portraits that posterity judges and will judge them. Nor was there ever a painter so well fitted as Van Dyck to transfigure an age. He could touch nothing which he did not adorn. He saw all men and women in the haze of his own natural grandeur. From the very first fortune smiled upon him. He possessed beauty, genius, fine manners, charm, all the qualities which in envy's despite ensured success. He conquered other lands as he conquered his own. Wherever he went he was received as one who had triumphed over life and the arts. The friend and favourite of kings, he was welcomed at Courts as he was welcomed in the studios. He painted the cavaliers and their ladies as one who knew profoundly the gross; he laughs little; he is sentiment of their lives. By frequently softened, though he instinct and understanding he knows not the deep sigh of belonged completely to the violent men. He never shouts. world of fashion and affairs. He corrects many of his masTo the genius of an artist ter's roughnesses; he is easy, he added the ease and adroit- because his talent is prodiginess of an ambassador a ously facile and natural; he combination rarely found in is free, alert, but he is never one man; and he painted the carried away." Court of Charles with the transfiguring skill that was his, because he was a painter who was also a courtier. You may see illustrated in his pictures an intense love of life's magnificent accessories. He paints jewels, gloves, and rich brocades with the feeling of one who delighted in sumptuous textures and richly coloured adornments. The difference between his temperament and the temperament of Rubens has been sketched by Fromentin with a rare insight. "There is always more sentimentality," he says, "and sometimes more profound sentiment in the delicate Van Dyck than in the great Rubens; it is a matter of fine shades and of temperament. There is a feminine trait in Van Dyck which he adds to the traits of his master. Between these two souls, so far apart one from the other, there is, as it were, a woman's influence; there is, so to say, a difference of sex. Van Dyck lengthens the stature of his models, as Rubens thickens them he puts into their portraits less muscles, less relief, less bones and blood. He is less turbulent, and never brutal; his expressions are less ... Such, in Fromentin's sketch, was Van Dyck, the painter, who put the Court of Charles upon canvas, and who taught England the art of portraitpainting. Not merely did he establish a school of craftsmen, to whom many of his later works are due, but he set a fashion of portraiture which in England at any rate was never discarded. Sir Peter Lely would have painted far otherwise than he did, had it not been for the example of Van Dyck. A painter of a less happy talent and of far less surety, he outdid his master in the use of pictorial rhetoric, and he has told us with considerable eloquence how the heroes of the Restoration displayed themselves before their fellows. Indeed, if we know the generation which grew up in Charles II.'s Court 88 we do know it, it is through the skill and energy of Sir Peter Lely. As a painter of men he was incomparably the greatest of his time. His ladies, either through the tyranny of the mode or their own timidity, are not always distinguishable one from another, and thus they prepare us for the uniformity of Sir Godfrey Kneller, But the influence of Van Dyck was not exercised profoundly upon our painters until the master had long been dead, and we cannot take a vast pride in the part played by our countrymen in the art of portraiture. Painting was still an exotic in England. Our kings were ready to pay those foreign artists who frequented their courts with money and honour. They could not find in their own who exchanged the romantic the history of a great age to beauty of Van Dyck for a lack our vision, but because he esof individuality, which could tablished, as on a rock, the art give neither pleasure to the of portrait - painting in Engfastidious nor offence to the land. vain. At Lely's death Kneller became the supreme and unchallenged painter of England. "Ten reigning sovereigns, says Mr Bell, "sat to him for their portraits, and for nearly forty years a never-ending procession of the noblest, wealthiest, and most intellectual personages in English society swept through his painting-room." The obvious fault of his portraits is their lack of character. They are for the most part things of periwigs and lofty head-dresses. No great injustice would be done if the names at their feet were removed, shuffled, and replaced. Yet it is only fair to Kneller to say that, unlike Van Dyck, he breathed less freely at the Court, where the greater part of his life was spent, than elsewhere. His portraits of the country skilled craftsmen who should commemorate them. This dearth of painters is the more remarkable, because in primitive times we boasted a vivid art, seen in manuscripts painted at Peterborough and elsewhere, which owed little or nothing to the example of France and Italy. Nor in the other arts had England fallen men of letters of the time behind. Her poets in the are living, breathing images, sixteenth and seventeenth cenpainted with insight, and they turies were supreme in Europe. remain the best record that we In the building of churches have of the age that is styled and houses she had few rivals. Augustan. Thus the rhetoric Her ancient mansions are still of Van Dyck was preserved, a glory of the land. The exeven in the decadence of Kneller, quisite style known as pernor did his influence cease with pendicular belongs to her and his century. Had it not been to her alone. Even in music for his influence, as Fromentin she might vaunt her Lawes says, "Reynolds and Gains- and her Purcell against the borough would have painted far world. In painting only was otherwise than they did." In she to seek. A procession of truth, his tradition still survives, strangers passed through and we owe whatever debt of Whitehall, coming and going gratitude we can pay him, not as seemed profitable to them. merely because he has shaped To Holbein and Zuccaro there succeeded Rubens and Mytens, so fine a success at Oxford that Cornelius Janssens and Miere- he rose to be mayor of the velt, Honthorst and Van Dyck. Respectable as were the works of William Dobson and Robert Walker, they are no match for the foreign masterpieces which happily still fill our picture-galleries. Meanwhile, as Mr Bell points out, though painters from the Netherlands set kings and queens upon canvas, a school was springing up of "commonplace unaffected portraiture, patronised by the middle-class citizens and provincial gentry, who demanded something not so much naturalistic in effect as simple in design and modest in scale." The journeymen who produced those simple works travelled up and down the land, or settled in provincial towns. Their works are to be seen in the universities or in country-houses. They display zeal rather than skill, and no doubt satisfied the craving for commemoration, to-day appeased more simply and cheaply by photography. Who they were who produced these modest portraits is as yet dimly ascertained. Hitherto research has passed them by, but, says Mr Bell, civic and family accounts, and a careful comparison of paintings, will assuredly lead to their rediscovery. Two at least of them are something more than names. One Gilbert Jackson seems to have been one of those wandering painters who went from town to town in search of commissions, and John Taylor, a nephew of the WaterPoet, practised his craft with borough! In one art alone-the art of miniature painting- did England hold her own against all comers. Here her masters were home - grown and of a native talent. The tradition of Nicholas Hilliard was unbroken, and the two Olivers, his artistic descendants, with Samuel Cooper, may be said to have been the chief ornaments of the British School. To the Olivers we owe portraits of kings and queens, of Sir Kenelm Digby and his family, and of many others, unnamed and unrecognised. To Cooper the debt of our gratitude is still heavier, for had it not been for the direct truthfulness of his art we should not know what manner of men were Cromwell and his friends. As it is, we have every right to be proud of this one supremacy, and, with the Olivers and Cooper in our mind, no feeling of national envy need disturb the satisfaction with which template Van Dyck's romantic treatment of a tragic period in our history. But if we can take small pride in our English painters of portraits, the list of those painted cannot but flatter our English vanity. No other country, few other centuries, could show so illustrious a roll of fame. If they look nobly upon canvas, well were they worth commemoration. Kings, soldiers, statesmen, and poets, they will bear compari son with the greatest of all contemporaries. Such, in brief, were the heroes who expressed in deed and word the energy of their age and land, and who deserve the immortality of aspect which the skill of the portrait-painters has added to their immortality of genius. the ages. Even apart from the atmosphere of romance in which Van Dyck enwrapped the best of them, their gracious bearing suggests a grandeur of talent and character. The kings, if not the wisest in our annals, are at any rate the most bravely spectacular. The mystery of Charles I., who gazes from Van Dyck's picture as in a dream, is a touching foil to the flamboyancy of his careless and wanton son. Oliver Cromwell does not touch the sympathy of all men, but in Cooper's magnificent miniature he is revealed for the great soldier and greater statesman that he was. And here are Strafford and Laud, Hampden and Lenthall, Ireton and Henry Vane, Falkland and Hyde, men of character all, and of courage to make their character felt. Then what a procession of poets here unfolds itself! Ben Jonson and Herrick, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marvell and George Herbert and Milton, Steele and Addison, deserve the honourable portraiture that is given them. In what other single age shall you match Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, Hobbes and Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan and Burnet, Pepys and Evelyn? United in this volume are Dryden, Defoe, and Swift, perhaps the three greatest men of letters who ever followed their calling with as much zeal as success, and who have cast an imperishable lustre upon the time which claimed them for In modern times the conditions of life and the arts have completely changed. If numbers may increase our selfesteem, then may we be proud of our portrait-painters. They may be found at work in every street. We have suburbs full of them, and they will turn you out an official presentment of general or alderman, in paint or marble, at the lowest terms and in the briefest time. They have not the distinction of Van Dyck. They are inferior in propriety to the journeymen who travelled from house to house in the seventeenth century in the patient search for clients. But they have clutched the skirts of notoriety. They gather together in clubs and academies, and to hear them acclaimed you might believe that with them the art of painting was born, with them it will die. And what is the record that they will bequeath of this age to posterity? A bare, literal record of unsightliness. Such rhetoric as they have is the rhetoric of the journal. It is not for them to tinge the prosaic life of everyday with romance, or to hint in the rapt expression of their models an unpierced mystery. The present generation will be transmitted to its descendants in its literal awkwardness. |