COMMUNICATION DE M. COLLINS BAKER
Crome, the head and co-founder of the Norwich School of landscape, was bom in Norwich in December 1768 ; eight years before John Constable, seven before Turner. He came of the humblest class : his father was a joumey-man weaver and his earliest youth was spent as a doctor’s errand-boy. He passed into the service of a coach-and sign-painter just before he was fifteen years old, and thus began his intimacy with pigment. A few rather coarse products of his industry as a sign-painter are preserved in Norwich, where he passed his life. He remained under the signpainter till 1790, in his spare time studying and copying such engravings as came his way. Apparently the tuming point in the yoimg man's career was the patronage of a certain Mr. Harvey, a collecter and amateur of pictures, living just outside Norwich. He gave Crome the opportunity of studying and copying pictures ; Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, and Dutch painters such as Van der Neer, Ruisdael and Hobbema were almost certainly the objects of Crome ’s ardent study.
The earliest works we know are of two types. One qui te unmistakeably based on Richard Wilson : of a pale, silvery, open air lighting, very unlike the usual Dutch tradition Crome : the second more difficult to account for, because in studying them we are reminded of two other artists, whom one can hardly suppose that Crome
420 ACTES DU CONGRÈS D’hISTOIRE DE L'ART
could hâve studied — Velâzquez and Rembrandt. We must, however, reflect that Tumer’s early dark mountain pictures may hâve been seen by Crome. The noblest examples of this type are the Slate Quarries, and the Moonrise on the Marshes ; the one in the Tate Gallery, London, the other in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square. Neither before nor after has this solemn conception been surpassed in European landscape. The Slate Quarries reminds us of the pure and aloof spirit of Chinese or Japanese landscape. The noble and serene Moonrise, developed from a Van der Neer basis, shews how the Englishman’s graver genius transmuted the often rather petty naturalism of the Dutch master into the monumental breadth and classic dignity of an epic. These two pictures belong to the end of Crome’s first period, to the years 1806-1808.
For convenience we divide his work into three periods. The first culminâtes with three or four masterpieces of this monumental breadth and gravity. In his next period we can, roughly, group his smaller, more conventional, more Dutch landscape. Here clearly Hobbema and Ruisdael are the main influence, but Gainsborough is an important ingrédient, giving a certain fluency to his brushwork and mass to his style. But we should note this : though this deliberately Dutch phase is the least satisfactory in Crome’s output, it is distinguished by a peculiarly . English perception of true out-of-doors lighting and a dawning consciousness of the qualities of plein air which make his last phase so remarkable. Throughout these middle years Crome was seeing more and more light and air, of a kind which Vermeer had seen before : the unartific’al light of cool grey weather which, as Rousseau said many years later, circulâtes everjrwhere.
The last phase of Crome, terminated by his sudden death, is the greatest. He died when little over fifty, but lived long enough to gain a place among the great masters of landscape, and a place in which he sits alone. Had he lived longer he might hâve advanced the dock yet further, anticipating the discoveries of the great
school of French Impressionists. But is is idle to speculate thus. His actual achievement suÉ&ces. That achievement, manifested in some half-dozen pictures, was the rendering of the wide liuninous spaces of sky and earth with a simplicity, economy and bulk which no other painter has compassed. He must hâve studied Cuyp in these last years, and I hâve no doubt he looked at Turner and Constable.
Cu5Tp is famous for his golden, sun tinted atmosphère. By a skilful use of repoussoirs of gradated strength, he expresses by set stages a délicate recession towards great distance. His System almost résolves itself into a mechanical de vice. Crome is less artificial, and sets himself to express limitless recession through sunny air without the aid of a receding perspective of repoussoirs. His spacing is larger, his massing simpler, his roUing earth bigger in plane, more solid and massive in bulk. He relies more on bulk of earth modelling, and on sufïusing light and air, than on silhouettes and variety of internai detail. If we place Cu5^'s masterpieces in the National Gallery side by side with Crome’s Household they look a little thin and unsubstantial. Constable is more vehement and spirited, more engaged by the restlessness and change of nature : absorbed in problems of flickering light, dramatic opposition of sun and shadow — the kinetic aspect of Nature.
Turner soared in realms of gorgeous vision and magic, iridescent delicacy, of tragic grandeur, and fairy atmosphère. There was no device he neglected, there were no technical resources he did not explore. He might be likened to Beethoven as regards the richness and passion of his genius, and to Wagner as touching the multiplicity of his orchestral experiments. With Constable he inaugurated the Romanticism and at the same time the lawlessness of modem painting. Crome was of the older faith. His sustained mood is a steady and gracions dignity — tender, robust, serene. Among musicians his kindred spirits are perhaps Purcell and Haydn, in their economy of means and serene simpheity. With far fewer resources than Constable and Turner, and a far simpler aim he
expressed a solidity and mass and dignity which we shall find in no other landscape painter. His System of painting was sound and simple. He had the science of good craftsmanship at his command. His impasto is rich, as Chardin’s and Vermeer’s is rich. In a letter he wrote to a pupil he declaredhissingle-minded purpose, the expression of breadth and dignity, light and air. Where so many landscape painters arrive at discreet years before they leave the City and set ont to cultivate the acquaintance of Nature, Crome, a country-lad like J. F. Millet, grew up in the midst of Nature, seeing it ail round him as his every-day environment. So he had no studio conventions to discard, no school préjudices to outgrow before he got down to truth.
He left a considérable School, sons, friends, pupils, imitators. They one and ail fixed upon the smaller and more Dutch type of Crome as their model. It is recorded that one of Crome’s most pious friends used Household Heath as a sun blind ! ; so little was his real genius comprehended. Some hundred and fifteen oils by Crome are known, including his important works and mere drawing-master compositions : and some seventy drawings and watercolours, mostly slight. He also left a considérable number of Etchings. Of our english masters, he is the most imitated and forged.
