The collection of foreign painters - Western European Painting, XVIII century

The most notable works in the National Museum’s collection of English painting are its eighteenth-century portraits. An acquaintance with the English portraits on exhibit in the Museum begins with Reynolds’s Miss Frances Kemble (Pic. 1), painted around 1783; concentrated in it are all the qualities peculiar to English portraiture.

Reynolds’s main rival was Thomas Gainsborough who painted his portraits with strokes as light as the gentle whiff of the breeze. That the artist was appreciated in official circles is proved by the fact that he painted a Portrait of Prime Minister William Pitt (Pic. 2).

The third important figure among the founders of the English portrait school is George Romney. In Mrs. John Chaworth Musters (Pic. 3) the artist brings out the woman’s ardent personality with a virtuoso interplay of blacks and whites; the other colours are diluted into watery spots, which produces the effect of a haze, a feature characteristic of English portraiture as a whole.

The last English portraitists of distinction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were John Hoppner and Thomas Lawrence. Hoppner reveals a tendency to treat the subject in a romantic vein, as in Miss Sarah Gale (Pic. 4), where the harmonious blend of colours and the fluency of the line work attain the acme of perfection. The portrait of Mrs. Edward Foster (Pic. 5) produced by Lawrence only two years before his death is a canvas so warm in tone that the blue of the the lady’s beautiful eyes seems to resound like a distant echo.

Eighteenth century Venice is represented by three well-known painters – Antonio Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and Michele Marieschi. During one of his trips to London Canaletto painted the townscape View of the Tames with Chelsea Colleage, the Rotunda and the Ranelagh House (Pic. 6), where the figures born in a fusion of light and air add a touch of vivacity to the stern elegance of the varied architectural forms, from the strict lines of the hospital at left to the sunlit houses at right and the green of the Ranelagh gardens lining the river. The Guardi housed in the Museum is a magnificent landscape from the artist’s early period – Venetian Scene: the Lagoon before the Fondamenta Nuove (Pic. 7) – which betrays a close affinity with Canaletto’s manner for its meticulous finish and accurate observation of reality. However, the jerky movements of the gondoliers and the disposition of the boats are indicative of the artist’s search for a style that would not limit itself to simply copying nature.

Deserving of mention in the collection of French eighteenth-century painting are two works highlighted by the aristocratic refinement peculiar to the art of the period – Portrait of a Lady (Pic. 8), by Louis Tocque and portrait of Elisabetta Fabiola Mascagni (Pic. 9) by François Xavier Fabre.

Worthy of mention here is also Luis Paret y Alcazar, a Spanish painter. In his canvas La Puerta del Sol in Madrid (Pic. 10) architecture preponderates over the crowd in which the rich mingle with the poor and every figure is delineated with the exactitude of a miniature.