[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 pieces of coal, from twigs and weeds in his painting-room?  Vain idea! these were but the memoria technica, that served to call up in his mind the thoughts he had fed on in many a lonely walk and leisure moment, when they of common clay plodded on and saw nothing—­brooded on with a nature tuned to the harmonies of colour and of form, organized in a high degree to receive and retain impressions of beauty; and gifted with the power to place vividly before us by his art objects which had so delighted and pleased himself.  Does any one think otherwise—­let him try what can be got out of stones and coals; let him try how his memory will aid him, with such feeble helps as broken twigs and dry mosses, and then he may be able to appreciate, in a degree, how this man had won the mastery of paint and canvas and turned their dross into the fine gold of true Art.