Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/673

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In England. 643 (1775 — 1853) attained to considerable eminence as water- colour artists in the early part of the present century ; but were both far surpassed by David Cox (1783 — 1859), who may be said, indeed, to rank second only to Turner in fertility of imagination, feeling for the poetry of nature, and power of rendering the characteristic beauties of English landscapes. His works are truly ideal productions, in which the leading features are breadth and transparency of colour, truth of foliage, whether at rest or in motion, and life-like play of light and shade. Of Cox, Redgrave says, " No painter has given us more truely the moist brilliancy of early summer time, ere the sun has dried the spring bloom from the lately-opened leaf. The sparkle and shimmer of foliage and weedage in the fitful breeze that rolls away the clouds from the watery sun, when the shower and sunshine chase each other over the land, have never been given with greater truth than by David Cox." A Welsh Funeral is cited by the same author as a typical example of his peculiar excellences; the series of landscapes in the South Kensington Museum are eminently charac- teristic. Peter de Wint (1784 — 1849) worked out an original style of his own, giving faithful and effective renderings of the general aspects of nature and of vast expanses of country, without any attempt at the finishing of details, cultivating tone and colour rather than form. Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787 — 1855), one of the first English painters of the Sussex Downs, and of marine effects, did much as President of the Water-Colour Society to improve the position of the professors of his own branch of art. t T 2