(1841–1896), who painted rippling water in bright sunlight with delightful delicacy and charm of manner.
The school of animal painting is a small one, and includes only a few of marked ability. The chief members include Briton Riviere, (b. 1840; A.R.A. 1878; R.A. 1881), one of the most imaginative and inventive of living artists; J. M. Swan (1847–1910; A.R.A. 1894; R.A. 1905), trained first at Lambeth, and afterwards in Paris Animal Painting. under Gérôme and Frémiet, a skilful manipulator and a sensitive draughtsman, and especially remarkable for his intimate understanding of animal character, mainly of the felidae (see also Sculpture); J. T. Nettleship (1841–1902), trained chiefly in the Slade School, whose studies of the greater beasts of prey are admirably sincere and well painted; Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch (b. 1869), trained in the Herkomer School at Bushey, who paints horses with unusual power; and John Charlton (b. 1849), trained in the South Kensington School, also well known by his pictures of horses and dogs.
There are local schools which claim attention because of the value of their contributions to the aggregation of British art. The most active of these belong to the Scottish school, the centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, which have produced some of the most distinguished British artists. The Royal Academy of London, indeed, with Scottish Schools. most of the other leading art societies, has been largely recruited from Scotland. There have been added to its modern roll the names of W. Q. Orchardson. Peter Graham, J. MacWhirter, J. Pettie, Erskine Nichol, T. Faed, David Murray, Colin Hunter, R. W. Macbeth, D. Farquharson, J. Farquharson, George Henry: all of them painters of well-established reputation; and there are many other well-known Scottish artists who have made London their headquarters, like Arthur Melville, a portrait and subject-painter and a masterly water-colourist; E. A. Walton, who is equally successful with portraits, landscapes, and decorative compositions; J. Coutts-Michie, who alternates between portraiture and landscapes of admirable quality; John Lorimer, who has exhibited a number of excellent subject-pictures and many fine portraits; T. Graham, an unaffected painter of sentiment, and a good colourist; Grosvenor Thomas, known best by his freely handled and expressive landscapes; T. Austen Brown, who paints semi-decorative pastorals with unusual vigour of statement; John Lavery, who has taken rank amongst the best of recent portrait painters; and Robert Brough, another portrait painter of vigour, with a subtle sense of colour, whose early and tragic death cut short a promising career. The most notable of the men who remained in Scotland include Alexander Roche, whose remarkable capacity has brought him many successes in portraiture, figure compositions, and decorative paintings on a large scale; W. Y. MacGregor, a leader of the school of landscape painters, fine in style and a master of effect; D. Y. Cameron, an admirable oil-painter and a famous etcher; and Sir James Guthrie, P.R.S.A. well known for his excellent portraits; James Paterson, R. B. Nisbet and Robert Noble, all landscape painters of marked originality and sound technical method; W. McTaggart (d. 1910), the brilliant impressionist; E. A. Hornel and W. Hole, decorative painters who have produced many canvases remarkable for robust originality and rare breadth of treatment; W. Mouncey, a landscape painter who united the dignity of the Barbizon school with a typically Scottish freedom of expression; and Sir George Reid, ex-P.R.S.A., one of the ablest and most distinguished of portrait painters.
The water-colour painters can fairly be said to have kept unchanged the essential qualities of their particular form of practice. They have departed scarcely at all from the executive methods which have been recognized as correct for nearly a century, but they have amplified them and have adapted them to a greater range of accomplishment, developing, it Water-Colour. may be added, the “blottesque” or the accidental manner suggestive of summary decision. Latterly water-colour painting has come to rival oils in its application to all sorts of subjects; and it is used now with absolute freedom by a very large number of skilful artists. Many of the men who have done the best work in this medium are known as oil painters of the highest rank; and among living workers the same capacity to excel in either mode of expression is by no means uncommon. There have been in recent times such masters as Sir John Gilbert, Sir E. Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A. W. Hunt, H. G. Hine, Henry Moore, Albert Moore, C. E. Holloway, and perhaps should be included E. M. Wimperis, whose water-colours are at least as worthy of admiration as their oil pictures. As water-colourists, much credit is due to Sir E. J. Poynter for his landscapes, portraits, and figure drawings; Sir L. Alma-Tadema for his minutely detailed classic subjects; Sir J. D. Linton for his historical and romantic compositions; Sir E. A. Waterlow for his delicately expressive landscapes; Sir Hubert von Herkomer for his admirably handled figure subjects; George Clausen for pastorals charming in sentiment and distinguished by fine qualities of colour; J. Aumonier, A. D. Peppercorn, J. S. Hill, J. W. North, Leslie Thomson, Frank Walton and R. W. Allan for landscapes of special excellence; E. J. Gregory (d. 1909), and Cadogan Cowper, for figure compositions painted with amazing sureness of touch; Alfred Parsons for landscapes and flower studies; J. R. Reid, W. L. Wyllie, E. Hayes and C. N. Hemy for sea and coast pictures; R. W. Macbeth, Claude Hayes and Lionel Smythe for rustic scenes with figures in the open air; J. M. Swan for paintings of animals; and G. H. Boughton for costume subjects and delicately poetic fancies. Besides, there is a long list of noteworthy painters whose reputations have been chiefly or entirely made by their successful management of water-colour, and into this list come Birket Foster, the head of the old-fashioned school of dainty rusticity; Carl Haag, a wonderful manipulator, who occupied himself almost exclusively with Eastern subjects; Thomas Collier, A. W. Weedon, H. B. Brabazon, G. A. Fripp, P. J. Naftel, G. P. Boyce, Albert Goodwin, R. Thorne-Waite, F. G. Cotman, Harry Hine, Clarence Whaite and Bernard Evans, whose landscapes show thorough understanding of nature and distinctive individuality of method; Mrs Allingham, an artist of exquisite refinement, whose idealizations of country life have a more than ordinary degree of merit; Clara Montalba, an able painter of impressions of Venice; Kate Greenaway, unrivalled as an interpreter of the graces of childhood, and endowed with the rarest originality; Mrs Stanhope Forbes, an accomplished executant of well-imagined romantic motives; and J. R. Weguelin, one of the most facile and expressive painters of fantastic figure subjects. By the aid of these artists, and many others of at least equal ability, such as J. Crawhall, J. Paterson, R. Little, Edwin Alexander, Arthur Rackham and J. Walter West, traditions worthy of all respect have been maintained sincerely and with intelligent discrimination; and to their efforts has been accorded a larger measure of popular support than is bestowed upon any other form of pictorial production.
See Richard Muther, History of Modern Painting (Eng. ed., 1895); R. de la Sizeranne, English Contemporary Art (Eng. ed., 1898); Ernest Chesneau, The English School of Painting (2nd Eng. ed., 1885); Clement and Hutton, Artists of the 19th Century (Boston, U.S.A., 1885); David Martin and F. Newbery, The Glasgow School of Painting (1897); W. D. McKay, R.S.A., The Scottish School of Painting (London, 1906); E. Pinnington, George Paul Chalmers and the Art of his Time (1896); Gleeson White, The Master Painters of Britain (1897); E. T. Cook, A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, vol. ii. (1901); J. E. Hodgson, R.A., Fifty Years of British Art (1887); A. G. Temple, Painting in the Queen’s Reign (1897); Cosmo Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists (1899); G. R. Redgrave, History of Water-Colour Painting in England 1750–1889 (1889). Also the Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art (Liverpool, 1888; Edinburgh, 1889; and Birmingham, 1890); the magazines devoted to the arts; and the principal reviews, such as “English Art in the Victorian Age” (Quarterly Review, January 1898). The Year’s Art (1879–1910; ed. A. C. R. Carter) is an invaluable annual publication fully and accurately chronicling the art institutions and art movements in Great Britain. (M. H. S.)
France
The period between 1870 and the opening of the 20th century was singularly important in the history of France, and consequently of her art. The internal life of the people developed on new lines with a vigour that left a deep mark on the outcome of mental effort. Literature was foremost in this new movement. The novels of Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, the brothers de Goncourt, Daudet, Guy de Maupassant and the plays of Alexandre Dumas fils, filled as they are with the scientific spirit and social atmosphere of the time, opened the eyes of the young generation to appreciation of the visible beauty and the spiritual poetry of the world around them, and helped them to view it with more attentive eyes, more insight and more emotion. The aim of art was also to emancipate itself, by the growing efforts of independent artists, from the slavery of tradition, and to devote itself to a more personal contemplation and knowledge of contemporary life under every aspect. Modern French art tends to become more and more the art of the people—a mixture of naturalism and poetry, deriving its inspiration, by preference, from the world of the working man; no longer appealing only to a restricted and more or less fastidious public, but, on the contrary, adapting its aesthetic or moral teaching to popular apprehension. The whole past was not, of course, wiped out. The younger generation had to learn and profit by the lessons taught by their great precursors. To understand the true character of this recent development of French art it is needful, therefore, to glance at the past.
We need not dwell on the individual authorities who constitute the official hierarchy of the contemporary French school; these masters belong for the most part, by the date of their best work, to a former generation. Starting in many cases from very opposite points, but reconciled and united by time, they carried on, during the last quarter of the 19th century, with more or less distinction, the inevitable evolution of their personal gifts.
