bridge leading to some lush, green meadow,--those are Gainsborough's materials. The famous "Cottage Door" is now at Grosvenor House. A young peasant woman, with her youngest child in her arms, is standing by the door of a country cottage, before which her other children are playing, some half naked; deep contentment is all around, huge old oaks spread their sheltering branches over the roof on both sides; golden rays of sunshine dance across the meadow. Only Frederick Walker has, in later days, painted such peasant women and such children, at once so tender and so natural. Of the four pictures in the National Gallery, "The Wood Scene," "The Watering Place," "Market Carts," and "Peasant Children," "The Watering Place" is the most celebrated. In the foreground a quiet pasture with cows, close by the herdsman, a Suffolk labourer; in the background a noble old Norman castle, perhaps Hedingham Castle, near Sudbury. It is through pictures like these that England has become the native-land of intimate landscape--_paysage intime_. As figure painters, as well as landscape painters, the English in the eighteenth century laid a course of their own, and it was not long before the other nations followed them. CHAPTER II THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT Goethe compared the history of knowledge with a great fugue: the parts of the nations first come to light, little by little; and this analogy, already once made by Hettner, holds true in a very high degree of the history of art during the eighteenth century. The three great nations of culture--the German, the English, and the French--take up their parts in turn, and through all there sounds one common, equal, dominant note. England was in the vanguard of that great period of struggle known as the age of enlightenment. Since the middle of the eighteenth century English influences had begun to fertilise the Continent. The truth and naturalness of English ideas were introduced as models, and England became in her whole culture the schoolmistress of the Continent. In every region war was declared against the pedantry brought over from the past, while new conditions were aimed at. Obviously it was not so easy for other nations to take their stand on the basis of modern society. England had accomplished her revolution in the seventeenth century; France was only preparing herself for hers. For all other nations, too, the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the new civilisation of culture were parting--an age of prodigious controversy, full of _Sturm und Drang_. Men did homage to every kind of extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and learning; in the _salons_ of the aristocracy courtly abbés file past with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of man.