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What else can this miller's son be called? Born in a windmill, he arose unexpectedly without a master, without example, without any instruction from the schools, to become a universal painter, who depicted life in every aspect, who painted figures, landscapes, sea-pieces, animals, saints, patriarchs, heroes, monks, riches and poverty, deformity, decrepitude, the ghetto, taverns, hospitals, and death; who in short, reviewed heaven and earth, and enveloped everything in a light so mysterious that it seems to have issued from his brain.
The subject was the De Witt family; and each portrait wore that genuine stamp of truth that left no question of their resemblance to the Dutch originals. There were some sea-pieces by Backhuysen, and one by Vanderveldt; several excellent landscapes; a couple of gallery pictures worthy a place in the Pitti, together with Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal.
The great-grandfather of Horace was a well-known artist at Avignon, a hundred and fifty years ago. His son and pupil, Claude Joseph Vernet, was the first marine painter of his time; and occupies, with his works alone, an entire apartment of the French Gallery at the Louvre, besides great numbers of sea-pieces and landscapes belonging to private galleries.
Nature, whenever undesecrated by the vulgarity of man, is ever sublimely simple. Everdingen and Ruysdael, on the contrary, studied nature in her simple northern garb, and the sombre pines of the former, the cheerful woods of the latter, will ever be attractive, like pictures of a much-loved home, to the German. Bakhuysen's sea-pieces and storms are faithful representations of the Baltic.
The ear was beguiled with the patting of the horses' hoofs upon the pavement; and some of the little animals reared, and ran before the others. There were also some charming little sea-pieces, in which the vessels sailed with their heads towards the spectators, and manoeuvred in a surprising manner. The whole concluded with a storm and shipwreck.
Then we had several oil-paintings and rare old engravings of my father's, which he himself had bought in Paris, hanging up in the dining-room. Two of these were sea-pieces. One represented a fat-looking, smoky fishing-boat, with three whiskerandoes in red caps, and their browsers legs rolled up, hauling in a seine.
He has left a few sea-pieces, always with cloudy heavens and heaving or raging seas; where he has given sketches of sea, and shore, the ærial perspective is rendered in tender gradations 'full of pathos. He has other pictures representing hilly, even mountainous, landscapes. In these foaming waterfalls form a prominent feature.
"The palm," says Lord Orford, "is not less disputed with Raffaelle for history, than with Van de Velde for sea-pieces." He died in 1707. Like his father, the younger Van de Velde designed everything from nature, and his compositions are distinguished by a more elegant and tasteful arrangement of his objects, than is to be found in the productions of any other painter of marines.
Macready remained the stage king, but he shared his royalty with the younger Kean. A younger Kemble had also played Juliet well, but the stage queen was Helen Faucit. In painting, Turner was working in his last style; Stanfield's sea-pieces were famous. Mulready and Leslie were in the front as genre painters.
In any of that master's lowering sea-pieces, representing the desolate crags of Calabria, with a midnight shipwreck in the distance, this Jackson's would have been the face to paint for the doomed vessel's figurehead, seamed and blasted by lightning.
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