deepening into twilight, or with the blue showing through rifted storm clouds. Cumberland and Westmoreland had for him no appeal comparable to the remembered charm of Suffolk. Gainsborough’s pictures of rural life do not properly come under the head of landscape painting, but the representation of country activities, and pure landscapes run into each other by many gradations. If we consider those pictures in which landscape elements distinctly predominate we shall find that the figures of men and animals are hardly more than animating or decorative details. One of the artist’s rare theoretical statements was to the effect that a landscape should admit only such figures as “create a little business for the eye to be drawn from the trees in order to return to them with more glee.”[630] Accordingly the figures whether of men or animals were painted because they helped out the scheme of light, of color, of form in the picture as a whole. But while this is true, it is likewise true that his rustic groups, his shaggy horses, his cattle, and goats, and donkeys, and pigs are something more than picturesque elements in the landscape. They help to individualize and interpret it, and they give it a quaint, homely charm. The grandeur of Wilson’s themes, the solemnity of his tone, make the few small figures in his pictures seem strikingly incongruous with the scene, but Gainsborough’s figures have an intimate union with the landscape. However impossible it may be to determine who is the “father” of English landscape art, there can be no question as to the value of having at the formative period of that art two men so unlike in education, temperament, and taste as Wilson and Gainsborough. One brought in the Italian, the other the Dutch influence, yet each was too strong an individuality to be a mere copyist. The one painted with poetic comprehension and in a grand manner, not only the sunny skies, clear air, bright lakes, and ruined temples of classic lands, but also, and with equal power, scenes of dignity, grandeur, and pathos, in his own land, while the other painted with genuine tenderness and affection the lovely scenes of rural England. Both loved Nature passionately and strove to express that love in their pictures. From the point of view of a growing taste for the beauties of the out-door world, both artists are of the greatest importance. The transfer of interest from man to Nature is as marked in their pictures as in any other realm of thought and emotion.