“Art is long and time is fleeting.”

When we step out of Trafalgar Square into the National Gallery we step into the midst of beauty. Two massive pale green marble pillars form the approach to the vestibule; their carved capitals are of alabaster from Derbyshire, their base of Aberdeen granite. Delicate yellow marble, like sunshine caught in stone, lines the side walls of the stair-flight. It is the beautiful _giallo-antico_ of ancient Rome. Red columns resembling jaspar, coming from the west of Algiers, support the arches of the ceiling; their pedestal is of marble from the Apennines. It is a fit entrance to the shrine of these world-famous pictures that are in a sense the work of all the greatest painters the world has known. All that is best in their work has come down into the art of our time.

I want you to imagine that, together, we are visiting the National Gallery, room by room, chatting as we go along of the various pictures, of the artists who have painted them, of their subjects, talking of the different schools to which they belong.

“What is a school?” you ask me.

No, it is not a place where you learn your lessons, where there is fagging and games, and rewards awarded, and punishments administered. A school of painters means a group of artists working under the influence of a leader—a painter, who has brought some new view of art into the world. One, for instance, brought colour and the harmony of colour, another brought what is called composition—that is arranging figures to the best advantage so as to serve the purpose of the work; another taught how to look at landscape and so on. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that to those who worked under the overpowering influence of a master, the new thing his genius had brought seemed such a great thing that they were content to go on doing it as if there were nothing more to be done. They and their master formed what is called a “school.” A school, therefore, is founded on some new view of art which comes as a priceless addition to the great accumulation of art-principles, contributed by all the other schools that have gone before. It is a sort of hoard of treasures.

In early art the subject was the first consideration. In the thirteenth century there was a great awakening of art in Italy. Cimabue and Giotto founded the Florentine school. A great many schools descended from it. All began by being religious. Painting, it may be said, was the handmaid of the Church, and the Catholic Church permeated the life of the people. The subjects demanded were taken from legends of saints. The Madonna reigned supreme in art. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when perspective, composition, the science of light and shade had been mastered, artists began to treat allegorical and mythological subjects, and above all portraiture.

The different schools that were affected by the great Florentine revival are the Sienese, the Ferrarese, the Bolognese, the Umbrian, the Paduan, and that of Lombardy, all culminating in the Venetian school in which art seemed to reach its climax. All represent a larger outlook upon the life of the people. Italy and after it Spain represent the Catholic influence in art. Every church contained numerous altars above which was raised a masterpiece. The art of the South was pre-eminently a Catholic art.

The art of the North was essentially a Protestant art, caring little for legends of the saints and the Madonna, caring very much for human beings and for the love of country. The Flemish school is a grand school of portraiture. It numbered Van Eyck, Rubens, Van Dyck among its supreme masters.

The Dutch school was developed only after the Reformation, and its painting is entirely independent of the Catholic Church, its art independent of Church patronage. Patriotism is the strong inspirer of Dutch genius; portraiture, landscape and genre painting (the painting that illustrates the modest incidents of home life) were its favourite forms of art. In portraits the Dutch masters painted the portraits of their burgomasters; in landscape they set themselves to preserve every feature of their low-lying, level pasture land, in genre painting all the simple avocations of the home-loving national life.

The German school shows the serious sincere ideal of the German folk. It was of short duration. The Thirty Years War put an end to the florescence of art. Albert Dürer was the great Lutheran painter, Holbein was the king of portrait painters. Then came the French school born of classic traditions, a school full of cultured, charming artificiality.

Afterwards, towards the end of the seventeenth century, came the English school. It is strong and individualistic, as is the nation. It had three foremost painters for its leaders—Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Gainsborough.