An English writer on art, painter, and etcher. He was the son of a solicitor, and was born at Laneside, near Shaw, Lancashire. His mother died when he was an infant, and his father, who was an inebriate, died ten years later. For these and other reasons Hamerton’s boyhood was lonely. He gave up in displeasure his preparation for Oxford, turned to poetry and art, and began writing for the reviews. He traveled in Wales, visited France, and in 1857 began his periodic encampments on an island in Loch Awe in the Scotch Highlands, described in “A Painter’s Camp in the Highlands and Thoughts About Art” (1862). This notable work was followed by the more technical “Etching and Etchers” (1868); “Contemporary French Painters” (1868); and “Painting in France After the Decline of Classicism” (1869). In 1869 he founded the Portfolio, an excellent art magazine, which he edited till his death. Among his other numerous writings are “The Intellectual Life” (1873); “Life of Turner” (1879); “The Graphic Arts” (1882); “Human Intercourse” (1884); “Landscape” (1885); and “French and English” (1889). Hamerton, who had married a French woman, passed his later years in France, and died at Boulogne-sur-Seine. Like Ruskin, Hamerton was an art interpreter to his generation, the medium between the artist and the public. For this he was eminently suited because of the catholicity of his taste, and his agreeable style. Consult “Philip Gilbert Hamerton: An Autobiography and a Memoir by His Wife” (London, 1896).

Personal

  In person, Mr. Hamerton is well formed and athletic, with a noble head, regular features, a very fine eye, and a superb beard, which is worn full. Like George Macdonald, he has the American type of face, rather than the English.

  The notion of being a dead man is not entirely displeasing to me. If the dead are defenceless, they have this compensating advantage, that nobody can inflict upon them any sensible injury; and in beginning a book which is not to see the light until I am lying comfortably in my grave, with six feet of earth above me to deaden the noises of the upper world, I feel quite a new kind of security, and write with a more complete freedom from anxiety about the quality of the work than has been usual at the beginning of other manuscripts.

  Throughout his life he made rules to bind his dreamy fancy to active study and production; they were frequently altered, according to the state of his health and the nature of his work at the time; but he felt the necessity of self-imposed laws to govern and regulate his strong inclination towards reflection and reading…. His love of sailing must have been closely connected with the inclination to a restful, peaceful, dreamy state, for although fond of all kinds of boating, he greatly preferred a sailing-boat to any other, and never wished to possess a steamer, or cared much to make use of one. Still, he took great pleasure in some forms of physical exercise: he could use an oar beautifully; he was a capital horseman, having been used to ride from the age of six, and retained a firm seat to the last; he readily undertook pedestrian excursions and the ascent of mountains.

General

  Ruskin is superb in his combinations; Hamerton exact in his method, and careful to protect his rear. Therefore the most useful books that could be placed in the hands of the American Art public at present are Hamerton’s “Painter’s Camp” and “Thoughts about Art.”… Mr. Hamerton’s first volume, entitled “A Painter’s Camp in the Highland,” we regret to say, is not a felicitous introduction to the valuable “Thoughts about Art,” which give the title to the second. It is unpleasantly inlaid with egotism and enamelled with self-consciousness. Mr. Hamerton’s critics cannot withhold attention from so prominent a feature of his book. The obtrusiveness of his personality invites attention. He seems not to have learned the art of existing fully in his work, without dreaming to speak of himself. True, any account of a painter’s camp necessarily solicits much consideration of its occupant; but it does not follow that we should be bored with trivial details, and anecdotes simply flattering to the personal appearance of the painter…. The personality revealed in Mr. Hamerton’s “Painter’s Camp” is very English; and when we have said this, we have said all. But let no one be deterred from making the acquaintance of Mr. Hamerton even in his “Painter’s Camp;” for he is young, he is hearty, he is interesting, and he is manly. We know of no books which are the result of more faithful study and practical consideration of the painter’s function, and which, at the same time, are so free from technical jargon. Mr. Hamerton is preëminently a useful writer on Art; he is certainly accurate and comprehensive.

  It is not my purpose to discuss his literary performances; and yet this brief sketch would lack an essential feature, without an assertion of their great utility, as well as their graphic force and beauty. You are not merely stimulated by his thought, but are helped in the field of art, just where you need assistance. His style has the prime excellence of pleasing while it instructs. Instead of astonishing and bewildering you with a maze of splendid works, or a cloud of such pictures as Ruskin sometimes puts before you, he gives you the clear-cut conception which throbs with vitality. You feel that you are in the leadership of a guide who knows his ground, and exactly what he is about.

  Once his back is turned we find it difficult to tell what he did say or what he did not say and yet this man may have been more useful to us than the teacher every one of whose items of information could be duly registered in a copybook. This, to my mind, is the case with all essayists of the class to which Mr. Hamerton belongs; and it is most of all the case when, as with the book under review, the subject is as vast and vague as the treatment is unsystematic…. It would be satisfactory could one undo the binding of this rather overpowering treatise, not merely in order to tear up a large number of quite unnecessary pages, but also in order to place some of the really valuable contents in the hands of one set of people, and another portion in the hands of another set of people. There is a large class of intelligent, but not intellectual, persons to whom the careful perusal of the two admirable chapters, “Why we are apparently getting less religious” and “Why we are really getting less religious,” would be of the greatest practical use, by showing them the time, feeling, and effort daily wasted by a timid or hypocritical clinging to effete standards. And there is, on the other hand, a large class also of persons more intellectual (I mean more conversant with books and theories) than intelligent, to whom it would do a world of good, freeing them from a certain frumpish and goody-goody middle class philistinism extremely common in literary people, to meditate over the chapters in which Mr. Hamerton expounds the infinitely greater variety of æsthetic, imaginative, and psychological impressions obtainable by and among the richer and more socially conspicuous members of society.

  Few artists are more expert than Mr. Hamerton in the art of etching, and his various works on and in connection with this art have made for him a high reputation.

  Was one of the most sagacious and best informed of art writers, a critic whose elasticity and range of mind, whose breadth of mental vision, whose possession, too, of literary taste and of historical knowledge, placed him—it is scarcely necessary to say it—in a category altogether distinct from, and above, that of the fluent scribbler who has no knowledge, and of the blameless but bigoted sectarian painter who, if he writes, writes with no literary talent, and with no range of even artistic vision beyond the walls of his own studio. Sympathetic and careful, flexible and amply instructed, Mr. Hamerton touched no subject on which he was not heard with profit…. Of the other works associated with Mr. Hamerton’s name, the very large volume on “Landscape”—at once pictorial and literary—and the substantial tome which goes under the title of “The Graphic Arts” are probably the two principal. To the second that I have mentioned I should give the higher place. Nowhere else is there afforded such admirable opportunity of weighing the claims of one artistic method or medium against the claims of another—not so much their actual degrees of merit (a matter practically impossible to gauge and idle to discourse about) as their individual characteristics, and their relative appropriateness for a particular labour. But by much that has not been mentioned in the few preceding lines, as well as by the books here briefly described, did Mr. Hamerton establish his claim to be esteemed as one of the most agreeable and serviceable contributors to the art literature of the time.

  Anyone who is familiar with his style will be prepared for the pleasure that he will find in this volume. The great charm of this author’s writings is the agreeable personal note that runs through everything that he has published. He is always frank, and he is nowhere more so than in the story of his life. He gives as his principal reason for writing an autobiography that he is the only person in the world who knows enough about his personal history to give a truthful account of it, and because he dreaded the possibility of falling into the hands of some writer who might attempt to write his biography with inadequate materials.

  Hamerton confined himself to the critics’ true rôle of interpreter of the artist to the public, and for this office he had many qualifications besides the essential one of considerable practical knowledge of art. Even his limitations and defects were in a manner part of his effectiveness. Take, for instance, his style. It is a model of simplicity and lucidity, and has a certain elegance and charm. So clear is it that its possessor complains somewhere that it prevented his having any reputation in England for profundity, it being an English idea that a clear writer is a shallow one. It is without passion, or warmth of coloring, or brilliancy of fancy, as cold as it is clear—the style of a well educated, gentlemanly person, not that of a poet or a rhapsodist. It can hardly be doubted that this is the style best calculated to carry conviction to the people for whom he wrote.

  He was probably as far from being a genius as an able and versatile man with his mind set on high ideals can well be. Nowhere in his work does it seem that he saw human life, external nature, spiritual or physical matters, with other eyes than those of the everyday Englishman…. He failed to explain rightly in his printed works that the language of the fine arts is wholly different from the language of literature, nor did he ever endeavor to make it clear to the English-speaking public which he addressed—and which of all modern societies of European origin, has the least knowledge of its own in these matters of fine art—that it is necessary to approach the work of art from the entirely non-literary standpoint occupied by the artist in order to understand it aright. It may be that he did not see his way to explain this without throwing his public entirely off the track and ceasing to keep it interested. It is certain that he knew how to keep it interested, and that, for his works in many volumes, some half dozen of which are large and costly, he retained an audience which constantly increased in magnitude until the close of his career. It is true, also, that no word of all the immense amount of printed discussion on art which he has left will tend to the confusion or the misleading of any one. It is probable that Hamerton had no more sense of humor than Wordsworth, nor, in spite of the apparent suggestions to the contrary which occur in Mrs. Hamerton’s “Memoir,” that he had much power of enthusiasm.

  His death was sudden…. He left an autobiography brought down to the date of his marriage. It was completed and published in 1897 by his widow, better qualified than himself to render justice to the many admirable traits of a sterling character somewhat deficient in superficial attractiveness, and less likely to bring into relief, as he has done, the foibles hardly to be escaped by one doubly prone to sensitiveness as author and artist. Much, however, that seems vanity is merely lack of a sense of humour. The writer’s undoubting conviction that whatever interests him must interest others burdens his page with superfluous detail.