The Rise Of Landscape Painting

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Jealous as he was of other painters, there was one of his contemporaries for whose art Turner had nothing but admiration. ‘Had Girtin lived,’ he once said, ‘I should have starved,’ and he roundly admitted that painter’s ‘White House in Chelsea’ to be better than anything of his own up to that time. Thomas Girtin was born in 1773 at Southwark, where his father was a rope manufacturer, and, like Turner, he was for a time the pupil of Dayes. But for his short life—for he died in 1802 at the early age of twenty seven—he would probably have rivalled Turner as a painter in oils, and though his career was cut short he lived long enough to make himself one of the greatest of our painters in water colors. In this medium his style was bold and vigorous, and by suppressing irrelevant detail he gave a sense of grandeur to the scenes he depicted. His chief sketching-ground was the northern countries, and particularly its cathedral cities, and his favorite subjects were the ruins of our old abbeys and castles, and the hilly scenery of the north. The water color at South Kensington of ‘Kirkstall Abbey’ is a fine example of his power to present his subject with truth and majesty.

A younger fellow-student with Turner and Girtin in the hospitable house of Dr Monro was another artist who achieved fame chiefly as a painter in water colors. This was Peter De Wint, born at Stone in Staffordshire in 1784. His father was a Dutch physician belonging to an old and respected Amsterdam family who settled in England. Peter, his fourth son, was originally intended for the medical profession, but was allowed to follow art, and placed with the engraver, John Raphael Smith, in 1802. Five years later he was admitted to the Royal Academy School, and the same year (1807) he exhibited at the Academy for the first time, sending three landscapes, and thereafter he exhibited there occasionally till 1828. But his reputation was principally made by the drawings he contributed to the Water-color Society, of which he was elected an Associate in 1810 and was long one of the chief ornaments.

De Wint loved to paint direct from Nature, and was never so happy as when in the fields. His subjects are principally chosen in the eastern and northern countries, and though often tempted to extend his studies to the Continent, the love of England and English scenery was so strong that, except for one visit to Normandy, he never left these shores. He formed a style of his own, notable for the simplicity and breadth of his light and shade, and the fresh limpidity of his color. He was a great purist in technique and objected to the use of Chinese white and body color, which he thought tended to give a heavy effect to a drawing. He excelled in river scenes, and ‘The Trent near Burton,’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensignton, is a beautiful example of his tender and faithful rendering of a typical English scene.

While De Wint excelled in painting the placid aspects of landscapes, his contemporary, David Cox, was at his best on a widy day or in stormy weather. Cox was the son of a blacksmith and was born at Deritend, a suburb of Birmingham, on April 29, 1783. During his school days he had an accident and broke his leg, and this misfortune proved to be his good fortune, for having been given a box of colors with which to amuse himself while he was laid up, young David made such good use of the paints that his parents perceived the bent of his genius, and when he was well again apprenticed him to a painter. David Cox received his first tuition from an artist who painted miniatures for lockets, but when his master committed suicide young Cox went to the other extreme of painting, and at the age of seventeen he became an assistant scene-painter at the Birmingham Theatre. It is said that he even took a small part now and then at this theatre, which was then managed by the father of Macready.

The Rise Of Landscape Painting (continued)