_Anecdotes of Painting in England_."

As Walpole's work was merely a compilation from the voluminous notes of
George Vertue, a painstaking antiquary who had collected every scrap of
information he could acquire in the early years of the eighteenth
century, his conclusions can hardly be questioned, and the foundation of
the English school of painting is therefore generally assumed to have
been effected by Reynolds. But as Wren's Cathedral replaced an older one
which was destroyed by the fire of London, and as that was reared on
the foundation of a Roman temple, so we find that the art of painting in
England was certainly practised in earlier times, and but for certain
circumstances much more of it would have survived than is now to be
found.

In other countries, as we have seen, the Church was in earlier times the
greatest if not the only patron of the arts, and there is plenty of
evidence to show that in England, too, from the reign of Henry III.
onwards till the Reformation, our churches were decorated with frescoes.
This evidence is of two kinds; first, entries in royal and other
accounts, directing payment for specified work; and secondly, the
remains of fresco painting in our cathedrals and churches. The former is
of little interest except to the antiquary. The latter has suffered so
much from neglect or actual destruction as to be considered unworthy of
the attention of either the artist in search of inspiration or the
critic in pursuit of anything to criticise; but when every
inconsiderable production in the little world of English art has had its
bulky quarto written upon it, it is curious that no one has yet
discovered what a splendid harvest awaits the investigation of these old
frescoes all over the country.

As it is, we have only to note that as religion was so important an
influence on painting in other countries so was it in England, only
unfortunately as a destroying and not a cherishing influence. Granting
the probability that there were few, if any, of our English frescoes
which would be comparable in artistic interest with those in Italy,
where the art was so sedulously cultivated, it must nevertheless be
remembered that only a fragment remains here and there out of all the
work which must have been produced, and that after the Reformation even
those works which did survive were treated with positive as well as
negative obloquy, so that where they have been preserved at all it is
only by having be