Genius Defined

Until recently, it was commonly thought that the importance of the art of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries lay almost entirely in those large and aristocratic portraits--Reyn-oldses, Gainsboroughs, Raeburns--that are found in every great museum. Today scholars and connoisseurs have set the record straight: not only was the art of England infinitely more than portraits, but it marked a high point in the history of Western art in general. Last week a superb exhibition of some 300 English oils, plus 138 watercolors and drawings, was on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond --the best evidence ever publicly presented in the U.S. of the genius of this particular time and place.

The collection belongs to Paul Mellon, the son of an English mother, a graduate of Yale and Cambridge, and (by inheritance from his famous father, Pittsburgh Financier Andrew Mellon) a collector of taste and sensitivity. From 1907 until 1914, Paul Mellon spent almost every summer in Britain, still remembers "laughing ladies in white with gay parasols, men in impeccable white flannels and striped blazers, and always behind them, behind everything, the grass was green." He developed a taste for fox hunting, for racing and for thoroughbreds; when in 1936 he bought his first 18th century English painting, it was a picture of a stable lad and a horse named Pumpkin by the great George Stubbs. The work was an admirable choice, for few men have raised the art of animal portraiture to such perfection as Stubbs.

Slowly Mellon added to this collection, although for years he concentrated on French impressionists. Then, four years ago, he began to buy English art of the period in quantity, with the help of British Art Historian Basil Taylor. Today Mellon's oils, drawings and watercolors, dating roughly from 1700 to 1850, include artists of whom even noted critics like John Ruskin and Roger Fry seemed to have been unaware. There are landscapes and animals, intimate "conversation pieces," sports pictures and seascapes as well as portraits --the entire era, in fact, tidily defined by the major artists who began it and developed it. The leading definers in Mellon's collection (see color):

sbHOGARTH. Though in medieval times England produced her full share of significant art, the centuries thereafter were stagnant ones. It was not until William Hogarth, a London hackwriter's son, born in 1697, that English art took on a personality of its own. For Hogarth, London was a stage, and when he painted and engraved the progress of his rakes and harlots like acts in a play, or when he opened the innards of Bedlam and Gin Lane, he caught the drama of England's lower depths as no other artist had. These works thrust upon English art a sense of flesh and blood, a spirit of realism from which it drew sustenance until sentimentality deluged the land in Victoria's day. But back of Hogarth's raw dramas was a tender man. No one who did not love children could have painted a little girl, with her plump red cheeks and faintly wistful gaze, so appealingly.

sbCONSTABLE. Yet the 18th century was also an age of romanticism, which the English painters found in landscape and seascape that were more personalized than any of their time. "It could be argued, in fact," says Basil Taylor, "that outside the sphere of literature, England's most important contribution to cultural history has been the exploration of landscape with all its artistic and imaginative consequences." John Constable was one of the most important contributors. "Light--dews--breezes--bloom--and freshness," he wrote, and these were what he loved. He felt no need to travel; for him, there was in Hampstead Heath or Dedham Vale enough drama to last forever. Mood and climate were one with him, and if a landscape might seem to overpower the people he put into it, it also seemed to cradle them.

sbJOHN CROAAE--or Old Crome, as he was known to distinguish him from his painter son--admired the Dutch painters of landscape, but like Constable, he could find a spectrum of mood in the mild countryside of Norwich.

sbGAINSBOROUGH, too, used landscape as an outlet for his inner poetry, and this, he liked to claim, was his first love. He had painted King George III, Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, a parade of dukes, duchesses, earls and countesses. And he was fed up. "I'm sick of Portraits," he wrote a friend, "and I wish very much to walk off to some sweet village where I can paint land-skips and enjoy the fagend of my life in quietness and ease." Gainsborough was deeply concerned with the architecture of his paintings. He did not paint on the spot, but composed in his studio by using both memory and a kind of model. "He would place coal or cork for the foregrounds, make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli," one visitor to his studio reported. A player of the viola da gamba, he sometimes thought of his landscapes as music. "One part of a picture ought to be like the first part of a tune," he said, "that you guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the tune."

sbTURNER. While Constable, Crome and Gainsborough were painters in the rustic style, Joseph Mallord William Turner painted in what Basil Taylor calls the sublime style. With his sketchbook and a change of linen, he wandered about England looking for scenes of abstract emotion, and it has been said that the whole romantic wing of today's abstract painting derives from him. Once he had himself lashed to the mast of a boat for four hours during a severe storm at sea. Critics called the resulting painting "a mass of soapsuds and whitewash." Turner protested: "I wonder what they think the sea is like," and the modern eye can readily see the inner turmoil and thunder. DEVIS. What stands out in the arr represented in the Mellon Collection is the quality that Historian G. M. Trevelyan called "the fullness of life . . . Perhaps no set of men and women since the world began enjoyed so many different sides of life, with so much zest, as the English upper classes at this period." Painters like Arthur Devis --one of the comparative unknowns brought to prominence by the Mellon Collection--caught them thus, just as the landscapists "depicted England at its best, at the perfect moment before the outrages on her beauty began."

So comprehensive is the Mellon Collection's display, in fact, that inevitably a part of London's tabloid press, the tch, has screamed about how Mellon "raided our stately homes." The London Times had a far more just and accurate view. "This is a collection that has been made from both the head and the heart, brought together with intense personal feeling and pleasure. This collection is not so much to be envied by the English as to be welcomed as a worthy ambassador from England."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.