DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68073#0358
332 OLD WORLD MASTERS
Thrice in England have pairs of geniuses appeared at the same time,
inviting comparison and attracting partisans—Keats and Shelley;
Thackeray and Dickens; and Reynolds and Gainsborough.
There should be no partisans. The more we love and admire Keats,
the better we are able to admire and love Shelley; the more we ap-
preciate and delight in Dickens, the more we are able to appreciate and
delight in Thackeray; and the more we comprehend and enjoy Sir Joshua,
the more we are able to comprehend and enjoy Gainsborough.
Although they were rivals—and quite bitter ones at times—the
two supreme English painters of the Eighteenth Century admired
each other prodigiously.
“Damn him! how various he is!” Gainsborough exclaimed of Rey-
nolds; and Sir Joshua remarked to Sir George Beaumont of Gains-
borough; “I cannot imagine how he manages to produce his effects.”
“What is it then that gives Romney his hold upon this generation
and will continue to give him a hold so long as a love of art endures
among us?” Humphrey Ward asks; and then he answers his own
question as follows:
“In part, of course, it is because he shares with Reynolds and Gains-
borough the good fortune of having kept alive for us a society of which
the fascination is enduring—that limited and privileged society of the
Eighteenth Century which has realized such a perfect art of living
and with which we can clasp hands across the gap as we cannot with
the men and women of Charles the Second’s time, or even of Queen
Anne’s. Much more is it because of temperament and training.
Romney was an artist in love with loveliness; because he found it in the
women and children of his time and stamped it on countless canvases.
“To our problem-haunted painters of to-day it may be seen that
his sense of form was ‘generic and superficial’; they may condemn
him because he did not try to penetrate deep into character and be-
cause he simplified too much, like the Greek sculptors. The lover of
mere human beauty will care little for such objections, provided that
a portrait gives him the essentials of a beautiful face.
‘ The witchery of eyes, the grace that tips
The inexpressible douceur of the lips ’—
Thrice in England have pairs of geniuses appeared at the same time,
inviting comparison and attracting partisans—Keats and Shelley;
Thackeray and Dickens; and Reynolds and Gainsborough.
There should be no partisans. The more we love and admire Keats,
the better we are able to admire and love Shelley; the more we ap-
preciate and delight in Dickens, the more we are able to appreciate and
delight in Thackeray; and the more we comprehend and enjoy Sir Joshua,
the more we are able to comprehend and enjoy Gainsborough.
Although they were rivals—and quite bitter ones at times—the
two supreme English painters of the Eighteenth Century admired
each other prodigiously.
“Damn him! how various he is!” Gainsborough exclaimed of Rey-
nolds; and Sir Joshua remarked to Sir George Beaumont of Gains-
borough; “I cannot imagine how he manages to produce his effects.”
“What is it then that gives Romney his hold upon this generation
and will continue to give him a hold so long as a love of art endures
among us?” Humphrey Ward asks; and then he answers his own
question as follows:
“In part, of course, it is because he shares with Reynolds and Gains-
borough the good fortune of having kept alive for us a society of which
the fascination is enduring—that limited and privileged society of the
Eighteenth Century which has realized such a perfect art of living
and with which we can clasp hands across the gap as we cannot with
the men and women of Charles the Second’s time, or even of Queen
Anne’s. Much more is it because of temperament and training.
Romney was an artist in love with loveliness; because he found it in the
women and children of his time and stamped it on countless canvases.
“To our problem-haunted painters of to-day it may be seen that
his sense of form was ‘generic and superficial’; they may condemn
him because he did not try to penetrate deep into character and be-
cause he simplified too much, like the Greek sculptors. The lover of
mere human beauty will care little for such objections, provided that
a portrait gives him the essentials of a beautiful face.
‘ The witchery of eyes, the grace that tips
The inexpressible douceur of the lips ’—