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A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF ENGLISH ART.
Italy. Here he won an enviable reputation and was urged to return to London and accept the position of Court Painter. During his life, he painted the portraits of ten sovereigns. His work is lacking in both quality and finish.
Sir Peter Lely is best known in his historical paintings, which are considered very good. Most of his pictures are now in private collections. Sur James Thornhill is noted for his frescoes in many public buildings of London and elsewhere. Some of his work is still to be seen in the cupola of St Paul's.
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts was founded in the latter part of the seventeenth century, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as first president. He was very popular and his paintings show the pleasant, highly polished, superficial society life which the English delighted in. His color was good, and he excelled all who had gone before in the management of colors, and blending of tints.
Wm. Hogarth, cotemporary with Sir Joshua, represents the other phase of English life—the hearty, good-natured country people and the lower classes. He succeeded so well in portrait painting, it seems strange that he should drift away from that to genre-painting, but he owes his fame to this departure. Hogarth was entirely original, and treated his subjects with so much vigor and truthfulness that he has immortalized the common life of England.
Turner stands at the head of English artisus in landscape painting. He was stout and rather below medium height, with restless eyes and a ruddy complexion. His dress was the reverse of neat and his hands according to Thornberry, were "the smallest and dirtiest on record." Turner is praised in such glowing terms in Modern Painters that "There is but one artist and Ruskin is his prophet" has become a proverb. He certainly is possessed of great ability as far as intellectual power, intensity of imagination and technical skill are concerned, but it is hard to see much beauty in some of his paintings, they are so bold in outline and color, and so startling in effect.
The Landseers, as a family, are all talented. Sir Edwin has become more famous than the others. He was born in London in 1802 and early manifested his wonderful talent. Some sketches made by him when five years old are still preserved in Kensington Museum. The promise of his early work is more than fulfilled in his later years. He excelled in animal painting, and all who have seen his works recognize the master hand which can so faithfully and touchingly portray the various characteristics of animal nature.
Wood engraving in England has reached a perfection unknown to any previous era in the history of art. Hogarth, Reynolds, Blake, Turner and the Landseers all made copies of their best paintings upon wood and steel.
The English were famous for their rich tapestry. Historical scenes, animals, flowers, were beautifully worked in colors. The high-born ladies devoted much time to this accomplishment and showed great ingenuity and talent in arranging the patterns and harmonizing the colors.
One far famed specimen of tapestry, which owing to its really exquisite character, has escaped what would have been inevitable destruction, is supposed to date from the last half of the eleventh century. The foundation for this work was a piece of brown linen nineteen inches wide and nearly two hundred and twelve feet in length. The original outlines, still to be seen under the embroidery, show the accuracy and vigorous simplicity of the Byzantine style. The pattern is fine needle work done in different