excellent painters of genre are Terborch, Metsu and Brouwer,
the two first painters of the life of the upper classes, the last of
peasant existence in some of its most unlovely aspects. The
pictures of Brouwer are among the most instructive documents
of modern painting. They are all small pictures and nearly
all exhibit nothing but two or three boors drinking, fighting,
or otherwise characteristically employed, but the artist's feeling
for colour and tone, and above all his inimitable touch, has
raised each to the rank of a masterpiece. He is best represented
in the Munich Pinacotek, from which has been selected fig. 30,
Plate IX. Hardly less admirable are Tenicrs in Flanders; De
Hooch, Ver Meer of Delft, Jan Steen, A. van Ostade, in Holland,
while in more modern times Hogarth, Chardin, Sir David Wilkie,
Meissonier, and a host of others carry the tradition of the work
down to our own day (see Table VIII.). Greuze may have the
doubtful honour of having invented the sentimental figure piece
from ordinary life that delights the non-artistic spectator
in our modern exhibitions.
§ 25. Landscape and Marine Painting. This is one of the most important and interesting of the forms of painting that belong especially to modern times. It is true that there is sufficient landscape in ancient art to furnish matter for a substantial book (Woermann, Die Landschaft in der Kunsi der altcn Vdlker, Munich, 1876), and the extant remains of Pompeian and Roman wall-painting contain a very fair proportion of works that may be brought under this heading. By far the most important examples are the half-dozen or so of pictures forming a series of illustrations of the Odyssey, that were found on the Esquihne at Rome in 1848, and are now in the Vatican hbrary. As we shall see it to be the case with the landscapes of the late medieval period, these have all figure subjects on the nearer planes to which the landscape proper forms a background, but the latter is far more important than the figures. In some of these Odyssey landscapes there is a feeling after space and atmospheric effect, and in a few cases an almost modern treatment of light and shade, which give the works a prominent place among ancient productions which seem to prefigure the later developments of the art. In the rendering of landscape detail, especially in the matter of trees, nothing in antique art equals the pictures of a garden painted on the four walls of a room in the villa of Livia at Prima Porta near Rome. They are reproduced in Antike Denkmdler (Berlin, 1887, &c.). These may be the actual work of a painter of the Augustan age named Ludius or Studius, who is praised by Phny {Hist. Nat. xxxv. 116) for having introduced a style of wall decoration in which " villas, harbours, landscape, gardens, sacred groves, woods, hills, fish-ponds, straits, streams and shores, any scene in short that took his fancy " were depicted in lively and facile fashion. Pompeian wall paintings exhibit many pieces of the kind, and we find the same style illustrated in the low rehefs in modelled stucco, of which the specimens found near the Villa Farnesina, and now in the Terme Museum at Rome, are the best known.
In medieval painting landscape was practically reduced to a few typical objects, buildings, rocks, trees, clouds, &c., which stood for natural scenery. OccasionaUy however in the MSS. these objects are grouped in pictorial fashion, as in a Byzantine Psalter of the 10th century in the National Library at Paris. The beginning of the 15th century may be reckoned as the time when the modern development of landscape art had its origin, and Masaccio here, as in other walks of painting, takes the lead. Throughout the century the landscape background, always in strict subordination to the figure interest, is a common feature of Flemish and Italian pictures, but, in the latter especially, the forms of natural objects are very conventional, and the impression produced on the city-loving Tuscan or Paduan of the time by mountain scenery is shown by the fact that rocks are commonly shown not only as perpendicular but overhanging. Titian is the first painter who, as mountain-bred, depicts the soaring peaks with real knowledge and affection (see the distance in fig. 22, Plate VII.), and the Venetians are the first to paint landscape with some breadth and sense of spaciousness, while, as we have seen, the Flemings, from Hubert
van Eyck downwards, distinguish themselves by their minute rendering of details, in which they were followed later on by Dürer, who was fond of landscape, and by Altdorfer. Of Durer indeed it has been said that some of his landscape sketches in water-colour are the first examples in which a natural scene is painted for its own sake alone. Some of the northern artists of the " Italianizing " school of the i6th century, such as Patinir, whom Dürer, about 1520, calls "Joachim the good landscape painter, " Paul Bril later in the century, and Adam Elsheimer, who worked at Rome about 1600, with several of their contemporaries, must not be omitted in any sketch of the history of the art. South of the Alps, the late Italian Salvator Rosa treats the wilder aspects of nature with some imaginative power, and his work, as well as the scenery of his native land, had an influence in the rapid development of landscape art in the 17th century, which was in part worked out in the peninsula. What is known as " classical landscape " was perfected in the 17th century, and its most notable masters were the Lorrainer Claude Gelee and the French Poussin and Dughet, while the Italianizing Dutch painters Both and Berchem modify the style in accordance with the greater naturalism of their countrymen.
The landscapes of Claude are characteristic productions of the 17th century, because they convey as their primary impression that of space and atmosphere. The compositions, in which a few motives such as rounded masses of foliage are constantly repeated, are conventional; and there is little effort after naturalism or variety in detail; but the pictures are full of art, and reproduce in telling fashion some of the larger and grander aspects of the material creation. There are generally figures in the foreground, and these are often taken from classical fables or from scripture, but instead of the landscape, as in older Italian art, being a background to the figures, these last come in merely to enliven and give interest to the scenery. The style, in spite of a certain conventionality which offends some modern writers on art, has lived on, and was represented in our own country by Richard Wilson, the contemporary of Reynolds; and in some of his work, notably in the Liber Studiorum, by Turner. Even Corot, though so individual a painter, owes something to the tradition of classical landscape.
The prevailing tendency of modern landscape art, especially in more recent times, has been in the direction of naturalism. Here the masters of the Dutch school have produced the canonical works that exercise a perennial influence, and they were preceded by certain northern masters such as the elder Breughel, whose " Autumn " at Vienna has true poetry; Savary, Roghman, and Hercules Seghers. Several of the Dutch masters, even before the time of Rembrandt, excelled in the truthful rendering of the scenes and objects of their own simple but eminently pain table country; but it was Rembrandt, with his pupil de Koningk and his rival in this department Jacob Ruysdael, who were the first to show how a perfectly natural and unconventional rendering of a stretch of country under a broad expanse of sky might be raised by poetry and ideal feeling to the rank of one of the world's masterpieces of painting. Great as was Rembrandt in what Bode has called " the landscape of feeling, " the " Haarlem from the Dunes " of Ruysdael (fig. 31, Plate IX.) with some others of this artist's acknowledged successes, surpass even his achievement.
Nearer our own time Constable caught the spirit of the best Dutch landscapists, and in robust naturalism, controlled by art and elevated to the ideal region by greatness of spirit, he became a worthy successor of the masters just named, while on the other side he furnished inspiration to the French painters of the so-called Barbizon school, and through them to many of the present-day painters in Holland and in Scotland.
To fix the place of J. M. W. Turner in landscape art is not easy, for the range of his powers was so vast that he covered the whole field of nature and united in his own person the classical and naturalistic schools. The special merits of each of these phases of the art are united in this artist's " Crossing; the Brook " in the National Gallery, that is probably the most
