Th Century English Landscape Painters

History does not as a rule divide itself into neat lengths exactly coincident with the centuries, and in a sense the period from William Hogarth to the death of JMW Turner is a single stage of development. But this period does fall, very naturally, into two parts, which correspond roughly with the last seventy-five years of the eighteenth century and the first fifty years of the nineteenth. In the first part the figure-painters, especially the portrait-painters, are dominant, and landscape-painters are struggling for recognition; in the second, landscape comes into its own, and in figure-painting there is a general decline from the standards of Joshua Reynolds and others.

The two painters who above all others gave effective expression to this changed attitude were J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). Their names are likely to be for ever linked together, but they were men of utterly different type and their approach to nature was essentially dissimilar. Constable, born and bred in the country, brought to his work an intimate familiarity with the homely facts of nature entirely absent from the work of the townsman Turner, which is always filled with a sense of the strangeness and wonder of the world.

19th Century English School of Landscape Watercolourists

Watercolour painting has been exploited more extensively and successfully in England than in any other country, and the water-colourists of the early nineteenth century constitute one of the chief glories of English art. As we have seen, this school arose in the first place from the work of the topographical draughtsmen, which the demand for engravings of 'gentlemen's seats' called into existence in the eighteenth century.

John Varley (1778-1842) another of these young artists, had a very far-reaching influence on the rising generation. He was a man of ingenious rather than original mind, with theories on composition and natural structure which must have made him an interesting and inspiring teacher, and he became the leading drawing-master of his time. Among his pupils were Samuel Palmer (1805-81), John Linnell (1792-1882), William Turner (1789-1862), W. H. Hunt (1790-1864), Copley Fielding (1787-1855), and David Cox (1783-1859), but besides these he had a great number of amateur pupils, and he probably did more than any one man to form the popular taste in landscape in the early eighteen-hundreds.

David Cox was a more independent artist. His work shows a completely different outlook from Varley's, from whom he can have learned little more than technical tips. He derived more from Girtin, whose broad washes probably found the starting-point of his personal and original handling. Cox was born at Deritend, near Birmingham, and began his career as a colour-grinder at the Birmingham Theatre, being later promoted to scene-painter.

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