Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/647

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In England. 617 As cotemporaries of Reynolds and Gainsborough, we may name George Stubbs (1724 — 1806), one of the best animal painters in England, and Sawrey Gilpin (1733 — 1807), both painters of horses; George Barret (1728 — 1784), and Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759—1817), both landscape painters ; and as foreign artists who worked in England in the eighteenth century, and to some extent influenced the English style — Giovanni B. Cipriani (1727 — 1785), Angelica Kauffman (1740 — 1807), already men- tioned in speaking of the foreign schools ; Francesco Znccarelli (1702 — 1788), to whose advice the adoption of landscape painting by Wilson was mainly due ; and Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740 — 1812), a celebrated scene painter. Benjamin West (1738 — 1820) was born in America, and is said to have obtained his first colours, made of the juice of leaves and berries, from the Bed Indians. He was self- taught, and brought with him to his adopted country all the American independence of spirit in which he had been bred. His determination to avoid imitation, and to work out an original manner for himself, are perhaps to be deprecated, as he had scarcely sufficient genius for the task ; but his works were a great advance on the conven- tional mode of treatment of historic subjects, and the intro- duction in his important compositions of cotemporaneous costumes, although much blamed at the time, was instru- mental in breaking down some of the trammels by which historic painters and sculptors were bound. His colouring is feeble, and his figures are wanting in life and character ; but in some of his best works — such as Christ healing the Sick in the Temple, in the National Gallery; Christ Re- jected ; Death on the Pale Horse ; and the Death of General