By Frederick Shum, F.S.A. 



57 



were celebrated for the manufacture of woollen cloth, before its in- 

 troduction into other parts of England; Sudbury, however, has 

 ceased to be a manufacturing town, while Bradford maintains, to 

 some extent, its wonted reputation. 



He was born in 1727, thirty years after Hogarth, who is entitled 

 to rank as the first great English artist ; for — unlike his predecessors 

 and contemporaries — Hogarth ignored and despised the convention- 

 alities of foreign art ; thoroughly original and independent, he was 

 free from all trammells, and, in theory and practice, he persistently 

 resisted a servile imitation of the " Black Masters." In the 

 characters of these two distinguished masters there was little in 

 common, still less in their works. Englishmen were only just be- 

 ginning to know something about art and to appreciate its value. 

 Hogarth and Gainsborough were both pioneers in the struggle for 

 the emancipation of art from the thraldom of an artificial and debased 

 foreign style. Their one aim and endeavour was to depict objects 

 as they really appear, and to portray Nature simply and truthfully. 



Strange to say, the lapse of one hundred and fifty years has brought 

 us to the opposite extreme ; and just as Foote, in his comedy of 

 " Taste," performed at Drury Lane in 1752, ridiculed the affected 

 mannerism and artificialities of art then prevalent ; so now, at the 

 present time, the play-writers of the day, Burnand and Gilbert, are 

 satirising, with merciless severity, the aestheticism now in fashion, 

 which treats the simplest object in Nature as almost divine and 

 worthy of devout admiration ; introducing into the very dress and 

 conversation of everyday life, a style and jargon that every manly 

 intellect cannot but despise as repugnant alike to common sense and 

 good taste. It is a source of consolation, however, that there is 

 this difference between the past and the present. In the former, 

 all the patrons and professors of art were under the baneful influence; 

 whereas, now that the knowledge and culture of art is so widely ex- 

 tended, the number of those who render themselves and their works 

 grotesque, by caricaturing the simplicity of Nature, is limited to a 

 few morbid and conceited artists, who, hankering after notoriety, are 

 bringing true art into contempt, by apeing simplicity and distorting 

 truth, under the pretence of realism. Of course they have their 



