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Searchology Directory 14
Page 06
In landscape the English have had something to say peculiarly their own. It has not always been well said, the coloring is often hot, the brush-work brittle, the attention to detail inconsistent with the large view of nature, yet such as it is it shows the English point of view and is valuable on that account. Richard Wilson (1713-1782) was the first landscapist of importance, though he was not so English in view as some others to follow. In fact, Wilson was nurtured on Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet and instead of painting the realistic English landscape he painted the pseudo-Italian landscape. He began working in portraiture under the tutorship of Wright, and achieved some success in this department; but in 1749 he went to Italy and devoted himself wholly to landscapes. These were of the classic type and somewhat conventional. The composition was usually a dark foreground with trees or buildings to right and left, an opening in the middle distance leading into the background, and a broad expanse of sunset sky. In the foreground he usually introduced a few figures for romantic or classic association. Considerable elevation of theme and spirit marks most of his pictures. There was good workmanship about the skies and the light, and an attentive study of nature was shown throughout. His canvases did not meet with much success at the time they were painted. In more modern days Wilson has been ranked as the true founder of landscape in England, and one of the most sincere of English painters.
The Dutch, too, as we have to some extent seen already, felt the horrors of Indian warfare. Kieft, the Dutch director-general, a man cruel, avaricious, and obstinate, angered the red men by demanding tribute from them as their protector, while he refused them guns or ammunition. The savages replied that they had to their own cost shown kindness to the Dutch when in need of food, but would not pay tribute. Kieft attacked. Some of the Indians were killed and their crops destroyed. This roused their revengeful passions to the utmost. The Raritan savages visited the colony of De Vries, on Staten Island, with death and devastation. Reward was offered for the head of anyone of the murderers. An Indian never forgot an injury. The nephew of one of the natives who twenty years before had been wantonly killed went to sell furs at Fort Amsterdam, and while there revenged his uncle's murder by the slaughter of an unoffending colonist. Spite of warlike preparations by Kieft and his assembly in 1641-42, the tribe would not give up the culprit. The following year another settler was knifed by a drunken Indian. Wampum was indeed offered in atonement, while an indignant plea was urged by the savages against the liquor traffic, which demoralized their young men and rendered them dangerous alike to friend and foe. But remonstrance and blood-money could not satisfy Kieft. At Pavonia and at Corlaer's Hook [footnote: now in the New York City limits, just below Broadway Ferry, East River] the Dutch fell venomously upon the sleeping and unsuspecting enemy. Men, women, and children were slaughtered, none spared. In turn the tribes along the lower Hudson, to the number of eleven, united and desperately attacked the Dutch wherever found. Only near the walls of Fort Amsterdam was there safety. The governor appointed a day of fasting, which it seems was kept with effect. The sale of liquor to the red men was at last prohibited, and peace for a time secured.
While there is no necessity for supposing an elevation greater than that required to lay bare a passage for animals back and forth, yet soundings undertaken by the British government have established the fact, that the ocean deepens very gradually away from the shores of the main-land until a depth of six hundred feet is reached, when the shore falls away very suddenly. This is supposed to be the sea-coast of that time. The English Channel would then have existed as the valley of the Seine, and the Rhine have prolonged its flow over the present bed of the North Sea. As the land stood at this height through a large portion of the Glacial Age, it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that primitive tribes hunted back and forth along these valleys, and so doubtless many convincing proofs of their presence at that early day lie buried underneath the waves of the sea. In like manner, at the south, we know that elephants, lions, and hyenas passed freely from Africa to Spain, Italy, and the Island of Crete,<7> and, consequently, the Mediterranean Sea must have been bridged in one or two places at least.
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