26X197 EW biographical works have deserved so well of the public as Allan Cunningham's celebrated Lives of the most Eminent British Painters. The secret of the success of the "Lives" lies in the fact that they are biographical records, narrated with sprightly vigour and discriminating intelligence; not mere critical dissertations, uninteresting to the uninitiated, subject to the indifference born of maturer judgment. Comparisons seldom really fit, whether made of a man or of a place— whether Reynolds be called the English Michael Angelo, or Edinburgh the modern Athens: but there is at anyrate some justice in the application to Cunningham of the designation, "The Scottish Vasari." In common with much of the famous record of the Italian chronicler, the main interest of the "Lives of British Painters" is concentrated upon personal details: the man is the dominant theme, the work merely incidental. This is as it should be, in a book intended for the general reader. The severity of criticism has condemned much in Vasari's chronicle that the gossiploving Giorgio probably considered irrefutable, but even in this day of jealous supervision of fact, his biographical records retain much of their old value in matters of detail, while in point of interest they have suffered no material diminution whatever. As yet, and probably for a long time to come, the same may be written of Allan Cunningham. We now know that in some of his judgments he was mistaken, that portions of his chronicle are faulty— and, again, as was inevitable, that circumstances of time and change have modified the accuracy of what were, in his day, reliable statements. But in the main we have no pleasanter and more trustworthy "gossip" than the worthy sculptor's assistant, accustomed to "toiling in marble and bronze all day, and at night dipping the pen in biographical ink to earn an honest penny for the bairns' bread." Even at this date- -as Mrs. Heaton has pointed out in what is much the best edition of the "Eminent Painters "*"it is curious to find how little our real knowledge has been widened" since Cunningham's death. It would, of course, have been quite impracticable to have given the whole, or anything like the whole, of the "Lives" in a single volume of The Camelot Classics; so I have selected therefrom (besides the Introductory Chapter on Art and Artists in England up to the Restoration period) the biographies of Hogarth, Richard Wilson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. These five celebrated artists are not only men whose biographies are of necessity full of permanent interest, but are the best representatives of the splendid sunrise of English Art-of the Art of Painting in England. Hogarth, the caricaturist-or rather the pictorial satirist; Wilson, * Lives of the most Eminent British Painters. By Allan Cunningham. Annotated and continued to the present time by Mrs. Charles Heaton. In 3 vols. (George Bell & Sons.) |