Pikes is “as grand an assemblage of mountains, dells, and chasms, as ever the fancy of Poussin suggested, or the genius of Rosa invented.” Later in the century the scenic school of the Italians partially gave way before the growing supremacy of the Dutch artists. In 1795 “Anthony Pasquin” in a critical review of the pictures exhibited in that year says, When many of our present race of landscape painters wish to make a _study_, they do it by their firesides; they take an old perished copy of Wynants, Ruysdael, or Hobbima, or a damaged copy from some eminent artist, and _compose_ by stealing a tree from one, a dock-leaf from another, and a waterfall from a third. By this means we have Flemish landscapes peopled with English figures, and the same unvaried scenes served up _ad infinitum_. That the taste of the purchasing public remained, until late in the century, steadily in favor of foreign work may be shown in various ways. Hogarth’s satires on the rage for “Old Masters” and Foote’s comedy “Taste” (1752) in which a picture is pronounced excellent until discovered to be by “an Englishman _now living_” when it is discarded as “not worth house-room,” are significant mid-century attacks on the undiscriminating demand for continental pictures. Records of sale by the celebrated auctioneer Longford illustrate the same fact. In 1764 he sold a collection of two hundred and fifty paintings belonging to Roger Hearne. About one third of these were landscapes, but not a single English artist, unless Van de Velde should be so counted, is represented in the list. In 1765 the pictures of “Mr. Samuel Scott, Painter (who is retiring into the Country)” were sold. Of these pictures thirty-three were his own landscapes. Of the remaining ninety canvases nearly all were landscapes, but again with no English names in the list except Lambert and Marlow. In 1768 Mr. Thomas Payne’s collection, largely made up of landscapes, has one each by Monamy, Swaine, Lambert, Scott, and three by Wootton. In 1769 the pictures of Smith of Derby were sold. He had five by Brooking, but all the rest were his own unsold canvases of Lake District, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire views. George Barret’s sale in 1771 was an attempt to dispose of sixty-seven of his own views in Wales, Ireland, and the Lake District. He advertised “waterfalls, effects of morning, of evening, of moonlight, a remarkable great tree, etc., etc.” It is not till 1790 that we come upon a distinctively English collection. In that year “Mr. Serres, Jun., Marine Painter (Going to Italy)” offered for sale five hundred and fifteen pictures nearly two hundred of which were landscapes by English artists. Thirty-two artists were named in the list. This slow development of English appreciation for English landscape art makes all the more evident the vitality of the impulse that led to productivity so ample and varied in that field. CHAPTER VII