If the severe in medieval design attracts the traveller , what foreign work can compete with our best monumental brasses , which in the fourteenth century show an Egyptian sculptor's contempt of superfluity ?sx The English have never been a race of imitators , but they have never , in their best days , run away from foreign ideas .sx Annexation and transformation have been our policy .sx Our classical adaptations in architecture were hardly less original than our Gothic creations .sx Inigo Jones and Wren first digested the Italian mode and then anglicised it .sx Wren set out on a tour of inspection but did not get as far as Rome .sx He built St. Paul's without having seen St. Peter's .sx The English genius is imaginative and intuitive .sx It catches fire from a few hints , absorbs , blends , and makes something entirely its own .sx In this way our visible arts resemble our literature .sx The great translators turned Plutarch and Ovid and Rabelais into absolutely racy English , just as Shakespeare peopled the walls of Troy or the streets of Rome with a purely English crowd .sx The Authorised Version of the Bible has all the virtues of an original master-piece .sx Even in the eighteenth century , an age when the national outlook on art and nature was most apt to be regulated by convention , individualism was always peeping out .sx It takes some believing that Gray's Elegy and Smart's Song to David were written about the same time ; and that the influence of Piranesi should have appeared in creations so diverse as those of the Adams , William Blake , and the architect Dance who built Old Newgate .sx The question is often raised , why under the Tudors and Stuarts , and until Georgian times , England was content for the most part with imported painters .sx It is worth remembering that the colour impulse in Europe is largely climatic , and therefore largely Oriental , in origin .sx It came to the North from the Mediterranean .sx Flanders , at the Northern end of the overland route from Venice , received it early .sx The colour-art of medieval windows , derived fromenamellers who settled in France with Venetian and Byzantine antecedents , had only been diffused through Northern countries by the influence of a united Church .sx The excellence of early English craftsmen in medieval manuscript illumination is generally recognised .sx The Benedictional of St. Ethelwold is a magnificent tenth-century example of the Winchester school , and the art was carried on with extreme beauty until the fourteenth century .sx If we had more of the wall paintings that adorned our churches , our estimate of their merit would probably be a good deal higher .sx In the Tudor age and in the seventeenth century we had miniaturists who were esteemed in continental countries , and it is even said that Holbein learned something in this branch of graphic art from Englishmen .sx We are still negligent of some good English seventeenth-century artists who were over-shadowed by the foreigners then in fashion :sx the painter William Dobson , for example , and sculptors like Nicholas Stone and Edward Pearce .sx Protestantism had not favoured pictorial art , and the admired eighteenth-century portrait painters , as we have already seen , came in at a time when the imaginative faculty had no deep tide of feeling or motive behind it .sx No historian of English taste should ignore the astonishing craft-genius which developed mezzotint engraving in such admirable .sx adaptation to the art of portraiture .sx Hogarth was long praised as a story-teller and a moralist to the neglect of his high pictorial powers , which to-day we have begun to recognise .sx Nearly all painters regard Turner as an artist who had every known resource of technical ability that could be brought to bear on his theme , whatever it might be .sx Constable , though he avoided heroics and found all the beauty he wanted in his own country-side , became an influence in the main stream of French painting .sx As an Englishman , he takes his place beside Wordsworth .sx He saw nature with his own eyes and broke away from the scenic tradition of his early training .sx In " first fine careless rapture " his oil sketches will stand with those of any master .sx He had the rare gift of enduing paint itself with a delectable quality .sx It is an instructive fact that so much of our best pictorial art comes from East Anglia , whose artists , like the great Dutchmen before them , had to make their own romance from the light and space of a country with no pretensions to obvious drama .sx Crome's Mousehold Heath in the National Gallery shows what imaginative scope is attainable by art that is distinctively local in its inspiration .sx Our school of water-colourists , beginning as topographical draughtsmen , soon evolved an art that is indigenous to the humid air of Britain , and .sx immortalised the fugitive moods of her landscape by methods that called for swift decision and permitted no second thoughts .sx Turner's short-lived con-temporary Girtin , and that brilliant painter Bonington , who also died young , belong to this fastidious succession .sx We have elsewhere noticed the out-standing genius of Cotman , but even in Cotman's presence we ought not to forget Peter de Wint , whose low harvest-field horizons , with their dark blobby trees against luminously quiet skies , are supremely individual and English in their charm .sx The value of reserve , so important in art , is hardly anywhere so delightfully understood as in the best works of these unassuming and comparatively unhonoured masters of water-colour .sx Of an earlier generation is Rowlandson , whom we associate with robust caricature of the " humorous " late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century type .sx Yet Rowlandson in some of his English country-town scenes reveals an exquisite discretion , a selective vision not less remarkable than the freedom of his drawing .sx We have seen that many Victorian artists could show , as book-illustrators in their youth , a freshness that disappeared in the works they produced as purveyors of Academy art to an insensitive public .sx It is unfortunate that these lapses , attributable to social conditions that irresistibly smothered art under .sx false standards , are so often taken as the measure of English susceptibility .sx Any Englishman who is tempted to belittle his own country in this way should have a look at some of the art which was officially admired in late nineteenth-century France .sx For vapid and cloying slickness , nothing could outdo the popular French Salon picture of that age .sx If comparison is to be made between the worst pictures now in the Luxembourg , and the diminishing number of Victorian anecdotes indulgently retained in the Tate Gallery , many of us would unhesitatingly prefer the works that pleased our own aunts and uncles .sx Just now we happen to be in a reaction from sentimentalism ; but if we must choose between vices , the facile tear is more acceptable , and more English , than pompous nullity .sx French artists seem to hang together in parties , and to announce their aims and claims , more effectively than is the way with Englishmen .sx Our painters and sculptors are more independent :sx and if in their youth they are strong enough to step aside from the broad path which leads to official honours and lucrative portrait commissions , they rely on the slow growth of public appreciation instead of trying to force their ideas on a reluctant majority .sx The consistently modern outlook of the Paris Exhibition of Industrial Arts in 1925 - in some ways enterprisingto the point of freakishness - showed what can be done by a compact minority who have decided to give the general public what it does not understand .sx A feat of this sort is unthinkable in our own country .sx In art , as in other things , the French act up to their own ruthless proverb that omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs .sx Broadly speaking , the whole of French art during the past fifty years may be split into two categories :sx the art which has boldly followed the evolution of what we call modernism , and the art which has been purely professional , serving no intelligent purpose at all .sx In England no such hard and fast distinction would be possible .sx Since the Pre-Raphaelites we have had many artists of original talent , artists of sincerity and ideas , who could not fairly be described as academic in the sterile sense , nor yet as modernists in tune with a European movement .sx Individualism and variety are baffling to critics who judge art by a formula .sx Matthew Arnold used to complain that the English literature of his time was isolated from what he called " the centre " ; meaning , I imagine , that our writers were too stubbornly native and personal to range themselves in line with style or thought that was common to the general world of culture .sx The writers and artists who become international figures are those who have a .sx symbolic importance , those who stand for some broad idea of universal interest .sx In pictorial art - the statement would be less true of sculpture - such rank for the best part of a century has been monopolised by French and French-trained masters ; but if this implies insularity in English art , we have the compensation that English art has the qualities of its defect .sx In any assemblage of French art since 1870 , once we go outside the score or so of names that are really significant , we find little else but discipleship or dullness .sx Among our own painters of the same period , if we take only those who are represented in the Tate Gallery - now one of the most vigorous and interesting of all public art collections - there are quite forty or fifty who have something of their own to say ; and the diversity they show , both of matter and of manner , is without parallel in the art of any other nation .sx All these intelligent British artists have been more or less alive to what has been going on abroad , and their works of course show certain affinities .sx We have painters who remind us still of the Barbizon school of Millet and his group ; painters who share some of the aims of French impressionism ; and painters of the younger school whose art affirms the re-discovery of form in the Cezanne and Seurat tradition , or shows an interest in cubistic research , or delights in a new order of decorative colour , or .sx gets pictorial value from contemporary concrete objects , chosen and seen in the spirit of an adventurous modern boy who loves wheels and wings and engines of all sorts .sx But it is surprising how seldom this English capacity of absorbing ideas can be accused of mere derivation from the continent .sx National antecedents and a national flavour are felt almost everywhere , as they should be .sx It may be useful to particularise or to group some of the artists who in this English ( or if you prefer it , British ) way have opened up new fields of interest .sx Though they were American by origin , Whistler and Sargent belong to the history of British art .sx At one time Whistler's name was a banner for young art-lovers who had fallen foul of Victorianism .sx Ruskin , dating from the older generation , had charged Whistler's " nocturnes " with " flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public " :sx a type of utterance with which we are still familiar , and which as a rule means only that the critic is not habituated to a new point of view .sx Whistler stood for the idea that pictorial art depends on its " formal " attributes .sx He got away from the journalistic and moralising and sentimentalising vogue of his time , and insisted that art is in itself a new creation , to be judged as a pattern .sx His Little White Girl in the National Gallery is characteristic in design , and shows how caressingly .sx he could paint .sx But he remains an eclectic , more sensitive to beauty as conceived by other artists than directly stirred by the solid and raw actuality of life .sx His discreet use of colour is that of the aesthete , who shrinks from bold assertion , craves for the impalpable , and sometimes achieves thinness .sx His best etchings , however , are masterly .sx In the Thames-side series he taught both artists and the public to find distinction in common or derelict settings , outside those " poetic " conventions of the beautiful which have always been such a hindrance to any sincere art of vision .sx Sargent was a more vigorous and direct artist who set a fashion of brilliance ; and brilliance , which is a quality of observant handling rather than of deep contemplation , does not wear well .sx