intellectual curiosity and imaginative ardour which had carried the arts to such heights of achievement in Italy. The Renaissance came late to England. Inigo Jones brought grandeur of style into architecture, but his figure-drawing partakes to the full of the mannerisms into which the Italian style had fallen. Yet everything related to this great name is of interest. Jones' designs for masques, at Chatsworth, still await publication. The Walpole Society has done good service by publishing, with very full illustrations, the Note Book of Nicholas Stone, preserved in the Soane Museum. This forms its latest volume. It has been admirably edited by Mr Walter Spiers, late Curator of the Soane Museum, who died in 1917. Unfortunately, he did not live to see his work published and enjoy the appreciation it has earned. It is a valuable contribution to the history of English sculpture. Stone worked under Inigo Jones for a time. He was a master mason who knew his craft thoroughly, but he was also a sculptor and architect, and his numerous memorial monuments show a remarkable variety and inventiveness of design. The diary of the younger Nicholas Stone on his travels in Italy-a document of lively interest-is printed for the first time as a supplement to this volume. English painting in the 17th century is overshadowed by Van Dyck and by Lely. There were English painters of distinguished talent, but little has been done to sift their work and make it known. In the Garrick Club, which contains so fascinating a collection of English pictures, often by men whose names are forgotten, there is a remarkable portrait of Nat Lee the dramatist. It is well-known from engravings. This picture is still generally referred to as a work by William Dobson, though that painter was dead before Lee was born. That is an instance of the kind of indifference to any precision and the ready acceptance of casual attributions which we meet with continually. The Walpole Society has published several careful and informing articles on 17th-century portraiture. The group of Lely's English contemporaries who worked mainly in pastel presents a dark problem, on which Mr Bell, of the Ashmolean Museum, and Mr Collins-Baker have now shed some light. Edmund Ashfield and T. Thrumton are artists to whose names known works can now be attached. Interesting as these painters are, the one who stands pre-eminent among them is Samuel Cooper, a master who has never received anything like his due of fame from his own countrymen. Had he painted in oils, and on the larger scale-his portraits are miniatures, but there is nothing small about his style-he would doubtless be more famous. There are portraits of women by his hand which are singularly intimate and expressive of subtle personality; beside them, the women of Lely, and many of Van Dyck too, seem superficial. With this insight, he had the delicacy that only real power achieves. There is nothing in Cooper of the later vague, elusive prettiness into which miniature painting decayed; he has precision, but is never dry. This school of portraiture, which from Hilliard descends through the Olivers to Cooper, Flatman, and Hoskins, can show many a small masterpiece. In it the mediæval tradition of the manuscript painters seems to have a sort of survival or revival. The union of firm craftsmanship with a sort of modesty and reserve is characteristic in both. The 18th century brings us to Hogarth, who for most people counts as the originator of the English school of painting. In the art of this century there is less work for investigators to do, though artists of some interest have been rediscovered in recent years. Some day, perhaps, the Walpole Society may devote attention to the 18th-century book-illustrators, who have passed into an obscurity not entirely deserved. The beginnings of landscape art in England provide again a field in which discoveries may still be made. It is curious that England should have been so late in producing her school of landscape, afterwards so vigorous and distinguished. In the recently published 'Miniatura' of Norgate, already mentioned, we find directions for painting landscape; and though an art 'so new in England,' he writes of it as having got much credit and being 'much in request.' One cannot help thinking that even in the 17th century there was more painting of landscape than has hitherto been supposed, passing now under foreign names, or destroyed, or lurking forgotten in country-houses. If, however, there was anything like a school of landscape painters in gouache at this period, it cannot have had much strength or character. Such landscape art as there was probably depended on Flemish example. The decorative landscapes by R. Robinson, published by Mr Tristram in the third Walpole volume, are curious as showing a passing influence from Chinese compositions on 17th-century art. These are panels which once decorated a house in Botolph Lane, and have happily been preserved with the room they adorned. But it is not till the 18th century that landscape art becomes serious achievement. Mr Bell contributes informing notes on some of our early masters in water-colour, bringing one or two hitherto unknown personalities to light, and correcting, from newly discovered material, received accounts. The fully illustrated articles on Turner's sketch-books by Mr A. J. Finberg also form valuable documents. All this is the kind of work which, when the subject was minor Italians of the 15th century, has been pursued by English students with solemn enthusiasm; but why should not the art of their own country receive some of their attention? Compared with France, or with the Netherlands, England can show no persistent and commanding tradition in the arts. In the Middle Ages England was not behind the countries of the Continent; at certain times, and in certain arts, she led. The Black Death came, a destroying blight; the Hundred Years' War, the War of the Roses, unsettled life, diverted money and wasted blood, treasure, energy at once. Puritanism both obliterated all it could of the once-cherished art of the past, and frowned down beauty in its own experience of life. The Renaissance came late to these islands, too late and tired and weakened to breathe fervour and force into the English arts. Traditions had been too effectually broken. The embers were cold. The imagination of the race flowed into literature. We see a man like Blake, who, born in the later Middle Ages, with a heritage of sound craftsmanship, might have shone for later time with a glory of rare achievement generating masterpieces in his successors-we see him reaching out from the prison of his own age to the halfdiscerned Gothic grandeur, striving to bridge over that immense and lamentable gap, and to recover the tradition's broken thread. Rossetti and his group, for whom Blake in his turn was a prophet, make another splendid effort to take up the interrupted story and bring back imagination to the arts of their country. But it is always a difficult fight; strife absorbs energy that should flow into creation. For this is the disabling circumstance: the arts have been divorced from the imaginative life. It is not that gift has been lacking. Any one who studies English painting in the 19th century must be struck by the abundance of fine talent-sensitive eye and dexterous hand-put to the service of an almost inconceivable triviality. The imaginative life of the century is scarcely hinted at; it is as if it did not exist We must accuse the patron more than the artist. Broken, obscured, beset by fatality and all kinds of untimeliness, the English tradition in the arts has been. But the capacity for expression in the arts has never died out. To recall and revive works of beauty made by our countrymen; to make known what fine traditions have been interrupted and neglected; to correct the prevalent ignorance and incredulity; this is the honourable task which the Walpole Society has undertaken. It is relevant also to the art of our own time. For the artist by instinct looks both before and after; he needs the support of previous achievement in working for the future, and he needs the faith of his countrymen in the national genius. LAURENCE BINYON. CORRIGENDUM. In the number for October 1920 (No. 465), p. 365, line 4, for Russian' read 'Rumanian.' The QUARTERLY REVIEW No. 467 I. The Saving Grace. II. APRIL, 1921 By Rear-Admiral Ronald A. Hopwood (Retired) The White Man and his Rivals. By the Very Rev. the Dean of St. Paul's III. English Agricultural Workers. By the Lord Ernle, M.V.O. IV. Benedetto Croce as Literary Critic. By Geoffrey L. Bickersteth. V. Imperial Unity and the Peace Treaty. VI. The Bagdad Railway. (With Map.) VII. The Search for Self-Government. By F. W. Eggleston By A. D. C. Russell By Barbara Wootton VIII. A New Life of Goethe. X. The Book of Revelation. By Mary Maxwell Moffat By the Rev. C. W. Emmet (With Map.) By H. Charles Woods XII. The Science of Public Administration. By W. H. Moreland, C.S.I., C.LE. XIII. Co-operative Labour in Italy. Published Quarterly by the LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION (BARR FERREE, PROP.) COMPANY 249 WEST THIRTEENTH STREET, NEW YORK. Single Copies $1.50 Yearly Subscription $5.00 Canada Subscription $5.00 per year; Single Copies $1.50 Entered at New York Post Office as Second Class Matter LONDON: JOHN MURRAY |