d graceful without affectation....

[Illustration: THE MARKET-CART.
_Gainsborough_]

Reynolds says: "It is difficult to determine whether Gainsborough's
portraits were most admirable for exact truth of resemblance, or his
landscapes for a portrait-like representation of Nature,"--a strange
judgment, written more with a view to a well-rounded period than to any
true criticism on his rival's landscape art. It is certainly true that
Gainsborough put aside altogether the early foundation of Dutch
landscape on which he had begun to build, and took an entirely original
view of Nature, both as to treatment and handling. Yet in the sense in
which the artists of our day paint "portrait-like representations of
Nature," Gainsborough's art was anything but portrait-like. It has been
objected to the great Italian landscape painters that they did not
discriminate between one tree and another, but indulged in a "painter's
tree." There is far more variety in those of our native artist, yet it
would puzzle a critic to say what his trees really are, and to point out
in his landscapes the distinctive differences between oak and beech, and
elm. The weeds, too, in his foregrounds, have neither form nor species.
On the margins of his brooks or pools a few sword-shaped dashes tell of
reeds and rushes; on the banks of his road-side some broad-leaved forms
catch the straggling sun-ray, but he cared little to go into botanical
minutiae, or to enable us to tell their kind. His rocks are certainly not
truly stratified or geologically correct--how should they be?--he
studied them, perhaps, in his painting-room from broken stones and bits
of coal. The truth is, however, that he gave us more of Nature than any
merely imitative rendering could do. As the great portrait painter looks
beyond the features of his sitter to give the mind and character of the
man, often thereby laying himself open to complaint as to his mere
_likeness_ painting; so the great landscape painter will at all times
sink individual imitation in seeking to fill us with the greater truths
of his art. It may be the golden sunset or the breezy noon, the solemn
breadth of twilight, or the silvery freshness of morn--the something of
colour, of form, of light and shade, floating rapidly away, that makes
the meanest and most commonplace view at times startle us with wonder at
its beauty, when treated by the true artist.

And did he study such merely from broken stones and piece