GAINSBOROUGH. MRS. SIDDONS.] [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ GAINSBOROUGH. WOOD SCENE, VILLAGE OF CORNARD, SUFFOLK.] In the domain of landscape painting, too, the new germs of naturalism, which had ventured above ground on all sides in the fifteenth century, had been again stunted in the Great Renaissance. The theory had been promulgated in the sixteenth century--in accordance with the idealistic methods of the age--that it behoved the painter to improve upon nature just as much as upon the human body. With the lofty style of the great figure painters, and their artfully pondered composition, there corresponded a school of landscape which was likewise conceived of, in the first degree, as an honourable, architectural framing for a mythological episode. England too possessed, in _Richard Wilson_, a believer in this doctrine, which became so widely promulgated in the seventeenth century through the influence of Claude Lorraine. The home of his soul was Italy. He scraped together a small sum of money by portrait painting, borrowed the rest, and felt himself in his element for the first time when he had reached Venice. Here, at the instance of Zucarrelli, he became a painter of landscapes, and was aided in his endeavours by Joseph Vernet in Rome. He was on the way to become a painter in great request, and in many of his pictures he shows a most delicate notion of well-balanced and gracious composition in the manner of Claude. But his success was of no long duration. Wilson, like so many other of his contemporaries, had the fixed idea that the Creator had only made nature to serve as a framework for the "Grief of Niobe" and as a vehicle for classical architecture. The interpolated stage scenery of trees and the classic temples of this English Claude, contain nothing which had not been already painted better by the Frenchman. When the king, in order to assist him, asked him on one occasion to represent Kew Gardens in a picture, he composed an entirely imaginary landscape and illuminated it with the sun of Tivoli. The king sent him back the picture, mordant epigrams appeared in the journals, and Reynolds scoffed at him in his Discourses. After that Wilson spent his days in the alehouse, until he got delirium, and died half starved at the age of seventy. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ GAINSBOROUGH. THE MARKET CART.]