LITMIR.BIZ

81

The magnificent portrait No. 52 is by some critics ascribed to Rubens. Van Dyck hardly ever signed his pictures.

82

Not all artists have learnt from this great work gladly. It was exhibited at the first exhibition of "Old Masters" at the British Institution in 1815, and B. R. Haydon tells the following story: "Lawrence was looking at the Gevartius when I was there, and as he turned round, to my wonder, his face was boiling with rage as he grated out between his teeth, 'I suppose they think we want teaching!'" (Autobiography, i. 292).

83

Such is the tradition. By many modern critics the picture is, on internal evidence, taken away from Van Dyck and given to Rubens. Mr. Watts in the article cited above says: "Attributed to Van Dyck, but hardly, I think, suggesting his work, though it would be difficult to attribute it to any other painter, unless, perhaps, on some occasion Rubens might have been inspired with so fervent a love for art that he forgot his satisfaction in scattering his over-ripe dexterity."

84

The statement found in many biographies of the painter that he was a brewer is a mistake. It arose from the fact that his daughter married a brewer, and that the painter himself was buried from his son-in-law's brewery.

85

See Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. vii. ch. iv. § 13.

86

Ruskin (ibid., vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. iv. § 16) notices this treatment of Apollo under the head of "Imagination Contemplative," as an instance of an imaginative abstraction "in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy-charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own Gallery, which the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo in Wilson's Niobe," see No. 110.

87

This figure is specially good. It was to rival this great landscape that James Ward (see 688), as he avows in his autobiography, painted his "Fighting Bulls," now in the South Kensington Museum. "How full of lithe natural movement," says Mr. J. T. Nettleship, "is the man in the foreground, in heavy boots and feathered hat, stooping and creeping towards the covey of partridges under cover of bramble and bush, compared with the clumsy anatomical bulls in Ward's picture" (George Morland, p. 54).

88

Ruskin is here speaking of the somewhat similar "St. George" picture in the Church of St. James at Antwerp.

89

See also No. 98, in which the tree is said by Ruskin to be "a mere jest" compared to this.

90

No. 78 was formerly Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Holy Family," on which notes will be found in Volume II. of this Handbook. The picture has now been withdrawn from exhibition and little remains of it, for owing to the excessive use of asphaltum the pigments have disappeared.

91

"Garofano" is the Italian for "gillyflower" (or clove-pink), and Tisio sometimes painted this flower as his sign-manual (like Mr. Whistler's butterfly).

92

Authorities differ between this title and "Pan teaching Apollo to play on the pipes." Certainly there is the "Pan's pipe," but then if it is Pan he ought to have goat's legs and horns. The fact that the picture is a companion to "Silenus gathering Grapes" makes also in favour of the description given in the text above.

93

See also Ruskin's remarks on the companion storm piece, No. 36.

94

It should be noted that this, as well as very many other pictures, has of late years been cleaned. Thus 98 and 68 (in 1880), 36 and 40 (in 1868), have been "cleaned and varnished." 31 was "relined, repaired, and varnished" in 1878; 161 was "cleaned and repaired" in 1868.

95

The diminutive title "Il Canaletto" was originally applied to Antonio's nephew and pupil, Bernardo Bellotto, but came to be transferred to Antonio Canale himself. The two Canaletti painted so much alike that their works are not easily distinguished.

96

Ruskin, on one of his latest visits to the National Gallery (1887), confessed that he had found himself admiring Canaletto. "After all," he said to me, "he was a good workman in oils, whereas so much of Turner's work is going to rack and ruin." Ruskin had made a similar concession long before to Claude. Writing to Mr. Fawkes on the death of Turner, he mentions a rumour that the artist had left only his finished pictures to the nation. "Alas! these are finished in a double sense – nothing but chilled fragments of paint on rotten canvas. The Claudites will have a triumph when they get into the National Gallery" (quoted in The Nineteenth Century, April 1900).

97

An amusing instance of the naïve ignorance of the sea which underlay much of the excessive admiration of Vandevelde is afforded by Dr. Waagen, for many years director of the Berlin Gallery, and author of Treasures of Art in England. At the end of a passage describing his "first attempt to navigate the watery paths," he says: "For the first time I understood the truth of these pictures (Bakhuizen's and Vandevelde's), and the refined art with which, by intervening dashes of sunshine, near or at a distance, and ships to animate the scene, they produce such a charming variety on the surface of the sea." "For the first time!" exclaims Ruskin (Arrows of the Chace, i. 16, 17), "and yet this gallery-bred judge, this discriminator of coloured shreds and canvas patches, who has no idea how ships animate the sea until – charged with the fates of the Royal Academy – he ventures his invaluable person from Rotterdam to Greenwich, will walk up to the work of a man whose brow is hard with the spray of a hundred storms, and characterise it as 'wanting in truth of clouds and waves.'" Dr. Waagen, it should be explained, had, on the strength of his first "navigation of the watery ways" pronounced Turner's works inferior in such truth to Vandevelde. Clearly Dr. Waagen, more fortunate than most of our foreign visitors, had a calm crossing.

98

It is interesting that another contemporary man of letters, the late Matthew Arnold, singled out these same lines for special praise: "No passage in poetry," he said, "has moved and pleased me more" (Fortnightly Review, August 1887, p. 299).

99

In this town were born two other painters, who are sometimes known by its name. Curiously enough, all three were originally masons.

100

Ruskin speaks of "the ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference of candle-light and black shadows for the illustration and reinforcement of villainy" (On the Old Road, i. § 48).

101

According to Morelli (Italian Masters in German Galleries, p. 56 n.), this familiar tale is legendary, Francia being merely an abbreviation of his Christian name, Francesco. But the painter sometimes signed his name Franciscus Francia, a form which on Morelli's hypothesis would be

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