24
THREE ENGLISHMEN WHO WERE DIFFERENT

GHOSTS! Do you like ghost stories? Stories of haunted houses, of chains clanking at midnight, of misty white shapes that you can see right through? Of course the best time to read a ghost story is at night. Then, though you know the story can't be true, it makes you feel creepy.

But I'll tell you of one ghost that won't make you feel creepy. This ghost won't even make you tremble in your boots. It's the ghost of a flea. It makes one smile just to think of the ghost of a flea, coming back to haunt, perhaps, the dog who scratched him to death. This flea ghost isn't in a ghost story. He's a more unusual ghost than that, for this ghost had his portrait drawn by a celebrated artist.

The artist who drew the picture of “The Ghost of a Flea”was William Blake. He was an Englishman who was living in London at the time the American colonies were fighting their Revolutionary War.

William Blake was very different from any artist I've told you about so far. For one thing, besides being an artist, he was a poet. For another thing, William Blake's pictures are not at all like the pictures of any other artist. For still another thing, William Blake saw visions. A vision is something like a dream — it is a sight a person sees only in his mind. Some people say that Blake was a little crazy, just a little crazy. Perhaps he was only different.

Blake had always wanted to be an artist. He studied engraving for many years, until he became an expert engraver. And then, when he set up in business for himself, he engraved his poems and his pictures together on one plate. This was a new idea that he himself invented. Before then the pictures in a book were engraved on a metal plate, but the words of the book were printed with a printing press. Blake made both pictures and words on the same plate, so the story was really part of the pictures and the pictures were part of the story.

He made and engraved pictures not only for his own poems but for many other books also. The most famous of all his pictures are the ones he made to illustrate the Book of Job in the Bible. These pictures of Job and his troubles are hard to forget, once you have seen them. Every time I think of Job I think of these pictures that Blake made. I can't help thinking of them.

Most of Blake's pictures that you see in books look like drawings. That is because they are made up of lines. An engraving has to be made with lines. But Blake generally made a painting for each picture before he engraved it and these paintings show he could use colors as well as lines.

Blake had had new ideas about painting and soon there were other English artists who had new ideas. But before telling you about them I'll ask you a question.

Have you ever seen a tree in summer time that had brown leaves? A live tree, I mean. Any one would know that a live tree has green leaves. Yet if you saw a picture of a tree painted about the time of Blake you would be surprised to see that it had brown leaves. As I told you, Gainsborough is noted for his landscapes. Perhaps you won't think him so great a painter when you learn that the leaves of his trees were generally painted brown. Now, those landscape painters must have known that real trees are green, but still they kept painting them brown. Strange, is it not? They must have thought the brown leaves looked better in their pictures.

But after Gainsborough came an English painter named John Constable and after him there were no longer so many brown trees. Constable tried to give his picture the colors he saw in real landscapes. This sounds easier to do than it really is. Even the whitest white a painter can put in a picture isn't nearly as bright as a dull sky on a rainy day. And if the picture sky can't be as bright as the real sky is,all the other colors have to be made a little darker than the real colors, to make the sky look bright enough. For the darker the dark parts of a picture are, the brighter the bright parts will look next to them.

Being darker doesn't keep the picture from being beautiful, but it does keep it from looking exactly like the real landscape. And so if a way could be found to make the colors in a painting look brighter, then artists could make an outdoor picture look more really outdoorsy. And that is what Constable did. He found a way of making paints look brighter. Instead of putting the paint on smoothly, he put it on in little dabs of thick color so that if you touch one of his paintings with your finger it feels rough.

Constable found that when he used little dabs or spots of color, the whole picture became brighter. The old way of painting a green field, for instance, was to paint it all green. Constable's way was to paint the field with separate little spots of green and yellow and blue. And, strange to say, these make the field look all green, unless you get too close to the picture. When you do get too close you can see the separate spots, but at a little distance the whole field becomes one color — a brighter green than if it had been painted a smooth, solid color in the first place.

My gracious! If you have read all that you are a good reader! And if you have understood it, I think you are a very bright child, whether your teacher thinks so or not.

So we remember Constable for two helpful improvements in landscape painting. He made trees green instead of brown.He made pictures brighter by using rough little spots of paint in place of smooth, solid colors. In Chapter 75 of this book you will find one of his pictures in which there are beautiful trees.

Many people believe the best English painter of all was the landscape painter Turner — Joseph Mallord William Turner. He came nearer than any other painter to catching the brightness of color and light of nature. He loved to paint the sea and the sun.

Now, of course the sun itself is so much brighter than any paint that no one can ever put it in a picture and expect it to look like the real dazzling, brilliant sun. But a painter can paint something that people can see is meant to be the sun. Turner often did something that Claude Lorrain had sometimes done. He painted “into the sun.” That is, he painted a scene with the sun right ahead. Generally he put the sun behind a cloud or in a mist or at sunset so that its brightness would not look too unlike the brightness of the real sun.

We know very well that no painter can find bright enough colors for a sunset, but people who saw Turner's sunset pictures said they were too bright to be true. They aren't true, but not because they are too bright, as these people said. It is because they aren't bright enough.

Turner could also paint the sea better than any one before him. He was a painter of seascapes as well as landscapes. Before he painted the sea he really studied it—how it looked when it was calm and how it looked in a storm — how it looked in the rain and in sunshine. Once he had himself lashed tight to the mast of a ship in a storm so he could study the sea without being washed overboard.

One of Turner's most famous paintings is called “The Fighting Téméraire”because that was the name of the old warship in the picture. The Téméraire had become too old for further use and the picture shows her being towed, by a puffing tug, to the dock — to be broken up. It is just sunset and the water of the harbor reflects the gorgeous orange and yellow of the sky. It is the end of the day and the end of usefulness for the old ship that has served her country for many years.

Even in the uncolored picture on the opposite page you can get an idea of the brilliant sunset that Turner painted.