English landscape painting from 1660 to 1800 falls naturally into three periods. During the first of these which ends in 1707 with the death of the younger Van de Velde, there was considerable landscape work, but nearly all of it was by foreign artists.[590] We do, to be sure, find early in the period an Englishman, Robert Streater (1624–80), who, in addition to his fame as a painter of historical and mythological subjects on walls and ceilings, was counted “incomparable” in landscape. His contemporary popularity is attested by the fact that in James II’s collection were five of his landscapes, but such examples of his work as are accessible in public galleries hardly substantiate his reputation. He founded his style, it is said, on “the late Italians.”[591] At the end of the period is Francis Barlow (1626–1702) who, anticipating the themes of George Morland, crowded his farmyard scenes with fowls of many varieties, with pigs, sheep, horses, cows, donkeys, and even deer. A tinted drawing by him in the South Kensington Gallery illustrates his lively conceptions, and indicates his clever use of landscape backgrounds. Working with Barlow as an engraver was Francis Place[592] (1647–1728) whose best plates were of animals, but who sometimes etched landscapes “for his own amusement.” A print of his “View of Scarborough” in the Print Room of the British Museum shows, in spite of the conventional wool-bag clouds, a notable attempt to represent truly a bold and rugged cliff with a distant sea-view and waves rolling gently in on a curving beach. But with these unimportant exceptions the painters of landscape in England before 1707 were foreigners. And of the foreign artists only the Van de Veldes, father and son, achieved more than local and temporary fame. Willem Van de Velde the Elder (1610–93) was already a famous painter of sea-pieces when Charles II called him to England in 1675. At Hampton Court may still be seen many of his huge canvases, chiefly important as pictorial chronicles of English naval achievement, but showing also effective use of sea and sky. The eighteenth-century estimate of Willem Van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707) is expressed in Walpole’s dictum, “Pre-eminence is no more to be contested with Raphael for history than with Van de Velde for sea-pieces,” and he still ranks as one of the great marine painters. English galleries, both public and private, are rich in beautiful examples of his work.[593] No other name so illustrious occurs in Walpole’s annals of this period. Of the other foreign painters it is sufficient to say that they were men whose habits of thought, whose tastes, as well as their technique, had been established in Holland, Flanders, or Italy, and who did their mature work in England because the desire of Charles II to revive the art activities fostered by his father seemed to offer a good professional opening. The fact that they painted in England had hardly more influence on the