THE National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, without taking Ruskin’s word for it, is the most important collection of paintings in Europe. The most expensive purchases are the “Blenheim Raphael,” “Blenheim Van Dyke,” the “Pisani,” “Veronese,” the two “Correggios,” and “Lord Radnor’s” three. They are splendid specimens of the greatest of the English old masters and so many of their successors; whilst the large collection of Turner’s is unrivalled and incomparable. In order to insure the high level of the National Gallery in point of quality, an act was passed in 1883 authorizing the sale of unsuitable works, thinning out the gallery in favor of provincial collections. The result of this wise weeding is that, though there are many galleries in which there are more pictures to be seen, there are none in which they are more really worth seeing. There is another way in which pictures interest the spectator in after ages: a painter inevitably shows us something of himself in his work. He shows us something of his age—of its costumes, its manner of life, and, if a portrait painter, the characters and physiognomy of its men and women. It is necessary to study them in historic order, as we find painting has in each school been a progressive one. I first studied the early Flemish pictures, which are a striking contrast to the Italian pictures. There is no feeling or beauty in them. What is it, then, that gives these pictures their worth, and causes their painters to be included among the greatest masters of the world? Look at the most famous Van Dyke; the longer you look the more you will see its absolute fidelity to nature in dress and detail, especially in portraiture. Here the men and women of the time are set down precisely as they lived. They were the first to discover the mixing of oil with colors, and made oil painting much more popular. Their pictures have an imperishable firmness, with exquisite delicacy.

The French painters were poorly represented here; especially did it seem so after viewing their wonderful exhibit at the Exposition. The Paris school is the chief centre of art teaching in the world; and is marked for its excessive realism and gross sensuality. This reminds me of one of their pictures exhibited at the Exposition—so shockingly realistic it should be barred from any exhibit; no place else would it be allowed to hang. Of course, the French are ideal painters as well; Claude Poussin and Greuze are striking contrasts.

The chief glory of the English school of painting consists in its treatment of landscape. The first man who struck out a more distinctly English line in landscape painting was Gainsborough; then followed Constable, whom every student of Adams in “Muncie Art School” is familiar with. How thoroughly I enjoyed seeing the originals, Constable’s “Valley Farm,” etc. Here they hang in all their originality. But greater than all his predecessors, and uniting in the course of his career the tastes and strength of them all, is Turner. Great difference of opinion is held upon the question wherein his greatness consists. Was it for truths that he recorded, or visions that he invented? It did seem as you looked around at his vast collection—the contrast between the dark and heavy pictures on one wall and the bright and aerial on the other—that “The gleam, the light that never was on sea or land—the consecration and the poet’s dream,” was there shown. His great aim or artistic ambition was to give a complete knowledge, and reach a complete representation of light in all its phases; and his greatest pictures are where he completely attains his aim. He was the first painter who first represented the full beauty of sun-color. He ended by painting such visions of the sun in his glory as in the “TÉmÉraire.” Turner said “the sun was God.” How happy I was to see the real, original “TÉmÉraire,” that I had tried so hard to reproduce with the assistance of J. O. Adams and Wm. Forsythe. As for Turner’s faithful rendering of the forms of natural objects, he was first, says Ruskin, “to draw a mountain or a stone, no other man having learned their organization and possessed himself of their spirit. The first to represent the surface of calm, or the force of agitated, water.” Turner did this with scientific accuracy, not because he was himself learned in science, but because of his genius for seeing into the heart of things and seizing their essential form and character, and that is what is meant by saying “Turner’s landscape is ideal,” and that is why he is the great impressionist he is. His pictures are of scenes not as any one might gather, but as representations of how he himself saw them. He at all times painted his impressions. The faculty of receiving such impressions strongly, and reproducing them vividly, is precisely what distinguishes the poet, whether in language or painting. He was great because the impressions which natural scenery made upon him were noble impressions. He not only saw nature in its truth and beauty, but he saw it in relation and subjection to the human soul. He paints the loveliness of nature, but he ever connects that loveliness with the soul and labor of men. Looking round this great room you cannot help note the spirit of the pictures. I tore myself away as the last call was heard to vacate the room. My next was to try to appreciate Rubens, Van Dyke, Rembrandt, of which there is a large collection, and then Raphael. Just opposite the entrance in Room VI. your eye rests immediately upon his great canvas, the “Ansidei Madonna.” If you had never heard of Raphael, the crowd that at all times surrounds it would attract your attention. His “Garvagh Madonna” is depicted as merely a human mother; so is the child a purely human child, the divinity being only indicated by a halo;—the two figures with a little St. John, the children playing with a pink. As late as 1171 the divinity of the Virgin was insisted upon. I lingered by the canvas of the Holy Family, painted by Michael Angelo. But what is the use of trying to study that wonderful exhibition as a whole, with its Leonardo da Vincis, its Murillos, its Velasquezs, and so on. I lingered in front of one of Rubens’s—a landscape painted in Italy, but a pure Flemish scene, just because Ruskin has said: “The Dutch painters are always contented with their flat fields and pollards,” agreeing with the Lincolnshire farmer in Kingsley’s “Alton Locke”: “None o’ this here darned ups and downs o’ hills, to shake a body’s victuals out of his inwards, but all so vlat as a barn’s vloor for forty miles on end—this is the country to live in!”

The Portrait of “Gevartius,” by Van Dyke, is considered by Van Dyke himself as his masterpiece, and before he gained his great reputation he carried it about with him from court to court to show what he could do as a portrait painter. I only wish I could reproduce it here, so as to show the liquid, living lustre of the eye that Van Dyke puts before you in this great portrait. Then there’s Rembrandt’s many pictures. He is the great master of the school who strive not at representing the color of the objects, but the contrasts of light and shade upon them. These effects he attains with magnificent skill and subtlety. The strong and solitary light, with its impenetrable obscurity around, is the characteristic feature of many of his best works, just such an effect as would be produced by the one ray of light admitted into the lofty chamber of a mill, from the small window, its ventilator. “The Woman Taken in Adultery” is a “tour de force” in the artist’s specialty of contrasts of light and shade; there is a succession of these contrasts which gradually renders the subject intelligible. The eye falls at once on the woman who is dressed in white, passes then to the figure of Christ, which next to her is the most strongly lighted, and so on to Peter, to the Pharisees, to the soldiers, till at length it perceives in the mysterious gloom of the temple, the high altar, with the worshippers on the steps.

But I am naturally drawn back to Turner’s wonderful room, possibly because it seems like associating again with dear old friends, for that which greets my vision as I enter is Turner’s “Crossing the Brook,” so much copied in the art school, although the original is as large again as the copy I attempted of J. O. Adams. It seems twice as valuable to me since I have had the privilege of noting the beautiful expression of tender diffused daylight over this wide and varied landscape. I think it was Charles Lamb who said, “My household gods are held down by stakes deeply driven, and they cannot be removed without drawing blood.” After all, one’s associates and co-workers go to make up an important part of one’s life.

I could not leave without once more turning back to my old “TÉmÉraire.” She, so I have read, was a ninety-eight-gun ship, was the second ship in Nelson’s line at the battle of Trafalgar, 1805, and, having little provisions or water on board, was what sailors call “flying light.” So as to be able to keep pace with the fast sailing “Victory,” when the latter drew upon herself all the enemy’s fire, the “TÉmÉraire” tried to pass her to take it in her stead, but Nelson himself hailed to her to keep astern. She lay with a French 74-gun ship on each side of her,—both her prizes,—one lashed to her mainmast and one to her anchor. She was sold out of the service at Sheerness in 1838, and towed to Rotherhithe to be broken up. The flag which braved the battle and the breeze no longer owns her. The picture was first exhibited at the Academy in 1839, with the above lines cited in the catalogue. Ruskin says this about it: “Of all the pictures, not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic ever painted; the utmost pensiveness which can ordinarily be given to a landscape depends on adjuncts of ruin, but no ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to the grave. This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief victory, surely if ever anything without a soul deserved honor or affection we owe them here. Surely some sacred care might have been left in our thoughts for her—some quiet space amid the lapse of English waters. Nay, not so; we have stern keepers to trust her glory to, the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunlight lay golden robe on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps when the low gate opens to some cottage garden, the tired traveller may ask idly, ‘Why the moss grows so green on the rugged wood?’ And even the sailor’s child may not answer, nor know, that the night dew lies deep in the war rents of the wood of the old ‘TÉmÉraire.’” The spirit of the picture, the pathetic contrast of the old ship’s past glory with her present end, is caught in the contrast of the sunset with the shadow. The cold, deadly shadows of the twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has arisen over the vastness of the departing form. As I remember it, Mrs. Rose B. Stewart, of the Muncie Art School, and the writer had a fair copy of the same, thanks to J. O. Adams.

While there is entertainment and recreation in this delightful collection, yet for my own personal benefit, aside from a few pets, I prefer the study and the ownership of modern painters and the new school.