It is the purpose of this chapter to indicate how far and in what way painting lent itself to the expression of that new love for Nature which, as we have seen, gradually became dominant in the realm of poetry, fiction, travels, and gardening. Such an inquiry is beset with peculiar difficulties in the case of pictures because they are seldom dated. At best we usually know only whether a picture is early or late in the artist’s career. After the beginning of public exhibitions with catalogues, which was not till 1760, something like accuracy in dates becomes possible, but the information thus obtained is not entirely reliable for the reason that pictures were not always exhibited the year they were painted, and it is certainly inadequate because so small a proportion of the pictures painted reached any exhibition. Furthermore, the pictures most important in establishing the early use of landscape would come before 1760. A second difficulty arises from the inaccessibility of much of the material, especially the important early material. Whatever was printed in a book had many chances of survival. A single brief poem indicative of a new love of Nature, even though a poem but lightly regarded by the author and his contemporaries, would hold its small place in his works and share in the reduplicated life of the tragedies, satires, and didactic poems to which he intrusted his fame. But an equally slight picture, though equally indicative of a new tendency, would have no such fate. Unregarded, unpurchased, its ultimate destiny would be destruction, or, possibly, burial in some attic. Even such of these pictures as still hold their own in some collection are widely scattered and often in private galleries not open to public inspection. This inaccessibility of much of the original material would be an insuperable difficulty from the point of view of the student of technique, but is less formidable in the present study which has to do not with qualities that would give the picture high or low artistic rank so much as with the thoughts the artist strove to express, his tastes, his feelings, the conception of Nature that guided his work. For this purpose we have as authentic material not only original pictures whenever obtainable, but also reproductions of various sorts, along with biographies, letters, and critical essays. From these scattered sources it becomes possible to make a brief but not wholly inadequate statement concerning the place of the external world in English eighteenth-century art. I. LANDSCAPE IN PORTRAITURE