No evil that the frivolous eighteenth century had wrought,
or that the classicism of the early years of the nineteenth had
perpetuated in art, was so great as the substitution of a conventional
type of picture instead of that directly inspired by nature; and
this artificial standard, which diverted figure painting from its
legitimate field, bore even more heavily on the art of landscape
painting.
Crome, by his isolation at Norwich, escaped this tendency. The Norwich
painters, however, were, to a certain degree, an accident. In the
London of their time, the almost total cessation of intercourse with
continental Europe, due to the war with France, had not prevented the
academical standard from penetrating and taking root. The independence
of Hogarth in the preceding century had been without result; and Sir
Joshua Reynolds, in principle if not always in practice, had preached
the doctrine of submission to accepted formulas. Benjamin West, who
had succeeded him as president of the Royal Academy, was little but an
academic formula himself; and landscape (whose greatest representative
had been, until his death in 1782, Richard Wilson, a painter of
merit, who had united to a charming sense of color an adherence to
the strictest classical influence) was wallowing in the mire of
conventionality.
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