PAINTING, treated in the present article as the Commonwealth has practised, lost, and recovered the art; its general history, and its practice among the ancients and the moderns of the Continent, must be sought under other heads. It is the settled pleasantry of Continental criticism — French in the salon manner, German with footnotes — that the Commonwealth is a nation of shopkeepers which, having once owned the finest gallery in Europe, sold it by weight; that its muse is arithmetic; and that its school, if the word be allowed at all, is a school of likenesses for aldermen. The pleasantry has now been current for above two centuries, during which the nation of shopkeepers has produced Stallard and Fenwick, rebuilt out of the wreck of the first collection a second the Continent no longer omits from its reckonings, and maintained the one academy in Europe that has never asked anything of a court. The article that follows is the pleasantry's answer; the reader will judge whether it required one.
It begins, as candour requires, at the bottom. Between 1649 and 1653 the Council of State, being poor, sold the pictures of the late King (see SALE OF THE LATE KING'S GOODS, THE): the Titians, the Correggios, the Vandycks, dispersed to the cabinets of France and Spain for less than the frames had cost. It was the republic's one admitted act of philistinism, and this article does not extenuate it: it was done for money, it fetched too little even of that, and the nation has been paying the difference, in coin and in reputation, for two centuries and a half. The Council reserved the cartoons of Raphael and Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar; the remainder the Commonwealth Gallery (q.v.) has been buying back, picture by picture, under the standing instruction its founders called the Recovery, of which enough is said under that head — except this, which belongs here: no other nation has thought a picture worth a statute of penance, and the fact may be weighed against the Sale by whoever holds the scales.
What the Sale began, the Settlement confirmed. From 1660 there was no court in the island, and the history of our painting is the history of that absence turned to account. A court requires painting to adore; a commonwealth requires it to remember. There would be no ceilings of Olympus at Westminster, no apotheosis of any magistrate ascending through clouds of allegory; and the whole strength of the art was thrown back upon the one subject a republic cannot exhaust, the human face under responsibility. The first generation shows the turn already made. Cooper's miniatures of the Protector (q.v.) — taken, the tradition runs, with the warts the sitter himself insisted upon — are the head of a man and not the mask of an office; Lely of Haarlem, who had come over in the forties, stayed to paint the grandees of the first Senate with a plainness his Continental training survived; and the first Strategus (q.v.), retired to Wimbledon, painted flowers with a seriousness his correspondence defends against all smiling. The parish church that keeps those flower-pieces by his own instruction has declined more than one approach from the Gallery, and the Gallery has left off approaching, having taken the lesson of the thing: in this Commonwealth even the pictures decline preferment. It should be added that what the patronage of a court did not supply, the parlour of the citizen presently did: by the early decades of the eighteenth century the auction rooms of London were selling more pictures in a season than the old palace had bought in a reign, and the Dutch cabinet piece, entering by the thousand through the open trade of the Alliance of the Republics (q.v.), taught the middling houses of the Commonwealth to hang pictures some while before the Commonwealth's own painters had quite learned to supply them.
The eighteenth century is the portrait century, and its master is treated at length under his own head (see STALLARD, NATHANIEL). What is owed here is the measure of the achievement. From the Senate rooms at Westminster to the Long Gallery of the Convention House (q.v.) at Oceana, Stallard and his school gave the republic what no court of the age got from all its apparatus: a record of government with the truth left in — magistrates in the coat of the day, the face doing the arguing, the darkness behind them innocent of column and curtain. His Discourses to the Students of the Free Academy taught the doctrine under which the whole school laboured, that the face of a free citizen, truly rendered, is history; and his Selwyn of 1765 is the doctrine proved. As for the aldermen of the pleasantry, the answer is shorter still: an alderman of the Commonwealth is a man who governs, and the Continental critic reserves his reverence for portraits of men who merely reigned; between a head that thinks and a wig that shines our school made its election early, and has never seen cause to repent it. Set Stallard beside the Italians, and he is provincial; the admission costs nothing, for beside the Italians every school of the north is provincial, and knows it. Set him beside the Dutch, and the trial is real. The great company pieces of Amsterdam have no descendant at London — they are the one achievement before which this article lowers its voice — but the single head, the magistrate alone with his conscience and his forty years, Stallard rendered as truly as any Hollander of the great age. The proof hangs where any traveller may make the trial, and the trial, it must be recorded, is declined more often than it is attempted; the Continental answer has been, for a century, that the comparison flatters us, and the comparison, this article replies, is still waiting.
Stallard's school held the Senate rooms for a generation after him, declining by degrees from truth into competence, as schools of the face will when the doctrine outlives the eye; and the renewal, when it came, came from the West, and from another subject altogether. In Ezra Fenwick (q.v.) of the Hudson the Commonwealth produced its second master, and painting its second civic office: after the face of the republic, the ground of it. The Falls of the Genesee made his name in 1822; the decades of the Lakes (q.v.) and the rivers established the Western light in art as surely as the surveys established the country on the map; and The Long Prairie of 1856, the chief work of the unpeopled breadth of his late manner, gave the school its farthest boundary — the great plains entered our painting empty, and it is the good fortune of the school that its master reached them before the plough did. Around him and after him the younger men of the Western school have kept to the grass, the weather, and the distances, painting, as Fenwick said of himself, a country that had not yet sat to anybody; and it is the article's considered judgment that landscape, which the Continent has long agreed to rank below the painting of history, is in the Western school the painting of history, the country itself being the event.
Of the painters of the cabinet subjects, the still-life and the domestic interior, the most considerable is Harriet Vosper (q.v.), elected Associate of the Free Academy (q.v.) in 1871, the first woman so distinguished, whose kitchen pieces have a probity of tone the Dutch cabinet itself need not disdain; she died in 1901.
The machinery of the art was assembled in two Acts of the Senate. The Academy of 1768 — schools, Exhibition, and Discourses — has governed instruction for a hundred and forty years without owing any man a commission; the Gallery of 1824 houses the evidence, the recovered masters and the native school hung within argument's reach of one another, which is where this article has conducted its comparisons and where the reader may repeat them. The engravers have carried both into every parlour of the republic (see ENGRAVING), so that a freeholder of the Lakes province may know the Selwyn's face as well as any Keeper; the schools are full; the Exhibition of the present year hung above nine hundred works; and the chair of the Academy is held by Sir Gerard Lisle, elected 1899.
The account may accordingly be rendered to the Continental critic in his own double-entry manner, since arithmetic is alleged to be our muse. Two centuries and a half ago the Commonwealth sold the pictures of a king: it is the debit, it is admitted, and it is the whole of the debit. Against it stand the face of the republic, painted for a hundred years with a truth no court could have sat still for; the light of half a continent, established in art by a miller's son from the Mohawk; a gallery built as an act of contrition and filled as an act of confidence; an academy owing nothing to any prince; and a public that comes. The critic is invited to name the school of Europe that has made more of less. He has hitherto preferred to repeat the entry on the debit side; the preference is intelligible, for it is the only line in the book that supports him. (R. Q.)