Britain's Best

The British muscled in on Chicago last week. In the heart of Anglophobe Colonel Robert McCormick's bustling bailiwick they set up a loan exhibition of 62 of Britain's best paintings, by Hogarth, Constable, and Turner. The British Ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, was on hand at Chicago's Art Institute to open the show with a suitably democratic address. Said he: "[These] painters . . . are all of the humble English earth; very earthy, simple folk, men of the people."*

There was nothing simple about William Hogarth, the earliest of the three, who made 18th Century London look like a highly dramatic hell. Nor was there anything earthy about Joseph M. W. Turner's blazey skies, and seascapes.

There was indeed humble English earthiness in the 19th Century's John Constable, who spent most of his life in the country, kept his eyes fixed on the beautiful. Wrote Critic Ruskin scornfully: "Constable perceives . . . that grass is wet, the meadows flat, and the boughs shady; about as much as . . . might in general be apprehended, between them, by an intelligent faun and a skylark." But Constable had enough faunlike intelligence and skylark blitheness to make him Britain's classic landscape painter.

*Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune, whose Anglophobia extends to a deliberate ignoring of titles, duly mentioned it as "Ambassador Clark Kerr's" speech.

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