LANDSCAPE 283 



The importance of Rubens, Claude, the two Poussins, and 

 Salvator Rosa is that they emancipated landscape from its 

 traditional dependence upon human motives, and proved that 

 Nature in herself is worthy of our sympathy and admiration. 

 However critics may be inclined to estimate the value of their 

 work, this at least is incontestable. Rubens fills his canvas 

 with a stretch of rolling country fields and miry roads and 

 hedges open to the flying lights and shadows of a breezy 

 morning sky. Claude concentrates his thought upon the 

 luminosity of atmosphere ; whatever else he paints, he is 

 always aiming at that. Gaspar Poussin delights in the 

 brown mystery of heavy-foliaged trees with thunder-clouds 

 or sultry heavens above them. Salvator Rosa transports us 

 to the ravines of the Abruzzi, where rocks are splintered and 

 chestnut-boughs hang broken from the giant stems. Clinging 

 still to the tradition that some historical or mythological 

 subject is required to make a picture, these masters introduce 

 Abraham, Odysseus, a sacrifice to Pan, or possibly S. Jerome 

 with his skull, somewhere into their composition. But the 

 relation between the human motive and the landscape is 

 reversed. The former, which had hitherto been all-important, 

 is now subordinated to the latter. The artist's energies 

 are bestowed on working out the scene, the atmospheric 

 luminosity, the open champaign, the massive foliage, and the 

 mighty clouds. The figures are carelessly sketched in, and 

 little heed is paid to emphasizing their action. They are 

 lost, as it were, in the space, diminished by the majesty of 

 nature. Man takes his position as a portion of the world, 

 not as the being for whom the earth and heavens were 

 created. He is drawn upon those broad canvases to scale 

 with trees which overtop him, and with tracts of hill and 

 vale on which he toils a moving speck. 



It would be interesting to pursue this subject further. 

 But I am not writing a history of the development of land- 

 scape painting. It is my business to deal with ideas rather 

 than with schools of art and pictures. Yet the work of the 

 Dutch masters (independent of Claude and Poussin and 

 Salvator Rosa, contemporaneous in date or somewhat later) 

 cannot be neglected. They contributed even more than these 



