370 The Evolution of Painting. 



and political revolutions to which England was subjected. 

 While Francis I was encouraging art, Henry VIII was en- 

 gaged in a hot controversy with Luther, and a little later he 

 had a hotter controversy with the Pope. While the French 

 were bringing works of art from Italy, the English were 

 burning paintings and covering the pictures in their churches 

 with a coat of whitewash, and putting up Scripture texts 

 in their places. The Madonnas were replaced by the second 

 commandment. Barry maintains that if the ancient Greeks 

 had been of the same leaven as the original English Quakers 

 or Puritans, they would never have excelled in art. 



The first English painter to attract attention was William 

 Hogarth. His work was all done in the eighteenth century. 

 Since the time of Hogarth, England has produced many 

 painters of note. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gains- 

 borough excelled in portraits, Landseer as a painter of ani- 

 mals, and Turner in landscape. Euskin mentions Reynolds 

 and Turner as the only supreme colorists among true paint- 

 ers outside of the Venetian school, and gives it as his opin- 

 ion that Turner was the greatest painter of all time. 



While the people of the United States have given their 

 attention largely to trade and manufacture and the develop- 

 ment of the country, they have by no means neglected art. 

 We have already many painters of real merit, and the future 

 is full of promise. 



There has been much discussion regarding the influence 

 of climate and other physical causes upon the development 

 of art. Buckle states that earthquakes have had a stimulat- 

 ing effect on the imagination, and that this particularly ac- 

 counts for the genius displayed by the Italian and Spanish 

 painters. Taine attributes the superiority of the Flemish 

 and Venetian painters in coloring to the hazy atmosphere 

 which prevailed in Flanders and Venice. He asserts that 

 Rubens and Titian merely copied nature as they saw it. It 

 may be added that Taine, in his lectures on the Philosophy 

 of Art, has carried the materialistic theory of progress to its 

 extreme limit. He maintains that the art of a period is the 

 product of all the physical, intellectual, and social forces of 

 the time. That the Last Supper of Da Vinci was as much 

 the product of all the forces of his time as was a stratum of 

 Potsdam sandstone of the age in which it was formed. 



Religion has everywhere exercised great influence over art. 

 In Egypt painting was under the immediate control of a 

 religion which paralyzed the artistic genius of the people by 



