INTRODUCTION.
Before unfolding the story of the Norwich School, and to assist in estimating its position and influence, the following facts should be recalled to our minds.
In these islands, as in every other part of Europe, traditions inherited from the grand past-masters of Italy and France restrained Art in fetters of gold until the close of the eighteenth century. That this should have been so is natural. In all Arts the precepts and practice of the most eminent become laws to their successors. Think for a moment of Claude Lorraine and Gaspar Poussin—the two painters whose landscapes are the crowning glory of their art. The first had, with the daring of an eagle, gazed at the very source of light; the second, following the great Italians, insisted on the value of a wealth of shade. No one can deny the worth of their teachings. But the enforcement of their methods of construction by academic prescription, in other climes than their own, hindered the growth of national schools. British artists were taught to Italianise their landscapes, as did the great Wilson, and to avoid the fresh salad green—that charming feature for which their well-watered land is envied—in favour of the siennas and russet browns of the burnt-up south! In 1760, we had painters like John Wooton and George Lambert representing, as Constable used to say, “English country gentlemen in their wigs, jockey caps, and top boots, with packs of hounds, careering in Italian landscapes resembling those of Gaspar Poussin in everything excepting truth and force.” When George III. unkindly returned to Wilson the Italianised view of Kew Gardens he had painted for the King, his action might have been excused on the score of common sense.
One of Wilson’s pupils—the kindly, accomplished, and travelled connoisseur, Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827)—became the fashionable leader of taste in the realm of landscape. At Cole Orton Hall, his newly-built seat in Leicestershire, surrounded by his Claudes, Poussins, and Wilsons, he spent each morning in his studio, which, being on the upper floor, commanded an extensive view of wellwooded and even mountainous scenery. Constable, who was his guest for five weeks in 1823, describes his studio practice thus (I quote it as a telling contrast
