23

A LATE START

D O you know what an international picture show is? It is a group of pictures brought together from different countries so that people can see how much alike and how different the paintings are.

Let’s suppose all the great countries in Europe had decided to have an international picture show in 1700 A.D.We shall have to call it a make-believe show because the various countries never thought of such a thing in those days.So let’s make our own rules.

We’ll say it’s 1700. Each country can send only one picture and the best will get a prize.

Now let’s say that all the pictures have arrived:

A Titian from Venice

A Michelangelo from Rome

A Velasquez from Spain

A Rubens from Flanders

A Rembrandt from the Netherlands

A Dürer from Germany

A Poussin from France

But where is England’s picture? Every important country except England has sent a famous painting. Now, England is one of the greatest countries in this year 1700, but all we get from England is a letter saying that she is very sorry but she can’t send us a picture by a famous English artist because she hasn’t had any famous artists. What! One of the greatest countries in Europe — perhaps the greatest — has no Painters?Well, what a disappointment that is for our show! But —

Though England had had no famous painters by 1700, she soon made up for lost time. Her first famous artist was three years old in 1700. His name was Hogarth. And after Hogarth came many more artists. If we had held our make-believe international picture show in 1800, England would have had plenty of paintings to choose from.

Hogarth began as an engraver of silver. Then he learned to engrave on copper and make prints from his copper plates.These prints were very popular and he sold enough of them to make a good living. But all the time he wanted to be a painter.So he painted pictures, but he was so well-known as a print maker that very few people considered him a great painter. They preferred his prints and engravings. He found that he could make engravings of his paintings and sell the prints much more readily than the paintings themselves. Nowadays we think of him as a great painter — the first great English painter.

Probably all boys and girls like to read the funny papers. A newspaper comic strip is generally very poorly drawn. You could hardly call it art. And yet Hogarth, in some of his paintings,used the same idea as the funny papers. He used to make a series of six or eight pictures about the same people, showing what happened to them from time to time. Only instead of being simply funny, Hogarth’s pictures were meant to show how bad certain things were in England at that time. They were often humorous, as well. That kind of humor we call satire.

Hogarth printed one series of pictures about a man who was trying to be elected to Parliament. One picture shows the man making a speech. Another shows him hiring men with clubs to make the people vote for him, another shows him bribing voters — that is, paying them to vote for him. Each of the pictures is a good painting by itself, but the whole series was supposed to be seen together, like the different pictures in a comic strip. And these pictures made a great impression on the Englishmen of Hogarth’s time. Perhaps they did help make things better as Hogarth hoped they would. Nowadays elections are certainly run as fairly in England as anywhere in the world.

Hogarth painted portraits too. He painted a portrait of himself with his little dog. He painted this picture of “The Shrimp Girl.” Nowa-days we buy shrimps in a store or at the market, but in London in Hogarth’s time people bought shrimps from girls who carried the shrimps around in a basket on their heads.

Hogarth has caught the shrimp girl’s smile as Hals caught the smiles in the portraits he painted — with quick, sure strokes of the brush. If you put this painting side by side with Dürer’s portrait of his father, it looks unfinished. And yet it tells you as much about the real shrimp girl as Dürer’s picture tells you about his father. I like it that way. Do you?

About the middle of the eighteenth century, while Hogarth was still painting, two other Englishmen were rising to fame as great painters. One was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the other Thomas Gainsborough. Both were best known as portrait painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds was a few years older than Thomas Gainsborough, and so I’ll tell yon about him first.

I’ll begin this story with an African pirate. But please don’t get excited. There isn’t a pirate fight in the story, much as I know you’d like to hear one. The pirate was a kind of Arab king who was holding up ships in the Mediterranean. The British were sending a captain with a squadron of ships to talk things over with the pirate.

Now, this captain was a friend of Reynolds and invited him to come along on his warship. Reynolds accepted the invitation and when he got to Italy he stayed there, to study the great paintings of Michelangelo, Titian, Correggio, and Raphael.He liked Michelangelo best. He liked Michelangelo so much he became deaf! That sounds strange, but it is true. Reynolds was working in the Sistine Chapel, studying Michelangelo’s paintings. He was sitting in a draft, but was so interested in the pictures he didn’t even notice the draft. Not till he got up to go did he notice that anything was wrong.But after that he began to grow deaf, and soon he had to use an ear trumpet. Reynolds went back to London and became the favorite portrait painter of the city. There were no cameras in those days, and so no one could have a photograph taken. Instead,people went to an artist and had their portraits painted. Poor people could not afford portraits by so expensive a painter as Reynolds, and so most of his portraits are of lords and ladies and their children. The king knighted him. Then he was Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Sir Joshua worked hard and tried to make every picture he painted better than the one before. He was especially good at painting women and children. Have you ever heard of pictures called “The Strawberry Girl”, “Master Hare”, “The Age of Innocence”, and “The Duchess of Devonshire and Her Daughter”? These are some of Reynolds’s best known portraits.

Unfortunately Reynolds was always trying out new kinds of paints and oils, so that many of his pictures have become faded or cracked. Some even faded soon after he painted them. But this didn’t make him less popular. A friend of his said, “A faded portrait by Reynolds is better than a fresh one by anybody else.”

This picture of five little angel heads by Sir Joshua Reynolds shows five different views of the same little girl.

The other portrait painter, Thomas Gainsborough, liked best to paint landscapes. He couldn’t sell the landscapes,however, and so he continued to paint portraits all his life. And very fine paintings they are. He made the people he painted look so graceful and charming in their portraits that he was in great demand. Gainsborough’s colors are not so rich and glowing as Reynolds’s — they are more silvery and gray.

One of Gainsborough’s paintings that has become world famous as “The Blue Boy” is thought to have been painted because Reynolds had said a picture with much blue in it could not be beautiful. So Gainsborough painted“The Blue Boy” to prove Reynolds was wrong.Gainsborough didn’t seem to like Reynolds, for some reason, and was always as rude to him as could be.Perhaps he was jealous of the other painter. But before Gainsborough died he asked Reynolds to forgive his rudeness and told him how much he admired him and his work.

Gainsborough painted portraits of many of the same people that Reynolds did. They both, for example, painted the Duchess of Devonshire and Mrs. Siddons. Which of the portraits of these two ladies is better it would be hard to say.Here is Gainsborough’s famous portrait of the duchess. What a big hat she has!

And here is Reynold’s portrait of the same duchess with her daughter.

Gainsborough’s landscapes are more admired than they were when he was alive. Though they are not so well-known as his portraits, they will help us to think of him as an excellent British painter.