Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... ENGLAND'S CONTRIBUTION HOGARTH England had amateurs before she possessed an art. Henry VIII. was Holbein's best customer. Charles I.'s advisers bought the finest works of the Italians, Flemings, and Dutchmen. From the time of Van Dyck, the great and little masters of the seventeenth century had a second home on the Thames. If a taste for the arts had been the determining factor, we might well wonder with Macaulay why, at the end of Charles II.'s reign, England had no native artist whose name deserved remembrance. But this very wonder touches a portion of the problem presented by the history of art in the island kingdom. For as a fact this poverty was by no means astonishing, and the present state of things in England is a consequence of those same causes which Macaulay overlooked. The start was momentous. All art is to some extent illustration, especially all youthful art. It should be so, just as the first stories that delight a child should be fairy tales. But English art was not. It did not spring from the nation, but came from without. It matters little that its first products were imports, for the same thing happened in other lands. But it was the demand and not only the supply that was an importation. The English tried to graft before they had a stock. If German art resisted inoculation overmuch, English art went to the opposite extreme. The faults of German art were errors of development, the results of a violent interruption in middle age. It had a happy nursery. English art had none. Lacking youth, it lacked also enthusiasm, confident self-surrender to a great cause, the earnest purpose which nerves the powers, gives self-sacrificing earnestness to individualism to help it on its way, and rears, not egotists, but heroes. Every...
