JOHNSON COLLECTION ROSE. 689 



We should have begun our notice of the British painters of this 

 group with Hogarth, the first and one of the greatest of them all. 

 He was among the notable revolutionists. At a time when art had 

 become over-refined and sugarsweet, when Watteau and Boucher 

 ruled the hour, he turned from their exquisite but unreal creations 

 to a strong, sane realism. He wrought in England a revolution as 

 great as that which David wrought in France, but on a more endur- 

 ing basis. David sought to turn back the hands of time, and to make 

 Romans of us all; and by the force of his powerful genius he suc- 

 ceeded for a while. But a conception so fundamentally false could 

 not long endure, and though David can never be forgotten, his in- 

 fluence is now negligible. 



Hogarth, on the other hand, is the strong rock on which modern 

 art has been built. In painting he is like Bach in music, the some- 

 what austere master at whose feet all have sat. In his own days 

 it was his satires on the vices of society to which he owed his greatest 

 fame. Now it is his admirable portraits, so realistic, so vitally alive, 

 that interest us most. 



One of his finest portraits is here ; Mrs. Price, an alert, intelligent, 

 high-bred woman, with head proudly erect, sure of herself and of her 

 position, dressed in blue, and painted with a marvelous realism. 



Among the greatest of the painters of classic landscape is Richard 

 Wilson. To the sense of distance and the ineffable peace of Claude 

 Lorraine, he adds the mellow afternoon light of Albert Cuyp or the 

 splendid sunset glow of Jan Both. His pictures are poems in color. 

 There are two of them here. The smaller and less important is in 

 his more usual style. It depicts a landscape through which flows 

 a river spanned by a bridge of five graceful arches, the whole bathed 

 in the sunlight of a serene afternoon. The other is an unusual pic- 

 ture, and one of the most notable that Wilson ever painted. It is 

 one of his largest landscapes. It presents a far-reaching prospect 

 suffused by a splendid sunset glow. It is truly a symphony in gold 

 and golden brown. 



To my mind the greatest of all painters of landscape is Turner. 

 Others may equal him in various aspects of his art, but none can 

 compare with him in his variety. He comes nearer the universality 

 of Shakespeare than any other landscape painter. He began with a 

 painstaking realism equal to Constable's. Then he dared to rival 

 Claude Lorraine, and in his Crossing the Brook, Child Harold's 

 Pilgrimage, and the works inspired by the glories and decline of 

 Carthage, he became a worthy competitor of that supreme master of 

 classic landscape where over scenes of ideal beauty and illimitable 

 spaciousness there broods a celestial peace. Then light and air fas- 

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