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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern Painting, by George Moore
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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+Title: Modern Painting
+
+Author: George Moore
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8162]
+[This file was first posted on June 23, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MODERN PAINTING ***
+
+
+
+
+E-text prepared by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+MODERN PAINTING
+
+By
+
+GEORGE MOORE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO SIR WILLIAM EDEN, BART.
+
+OF ALL MY BOOKS, THIS IS THE ONE YOU LIKE BEST; ITS SUBJECT HAS BEEN
+THE SUBJECT OF NEARLY ALL OUR CONVERSATIONS IN THE PAST, AND I SUPPOSE
+WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF MANY CONVERSATIONS IN THE FUTURE; SO, LOOKING
+BACK AND FORWARD, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO YOU.
+
+G. M.
+
+
+
+_The Editor of "The Speaker" allowed me to publish from time to time
+chapters of a book on art. These chapters have been gathered from the
+mass of art journalism which had grown about them, and I reprint them
+in the sequence originally intended_.
+
+_G. M._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+WHISTLER
+CHAVANNES, MILLET, AND MANET
+THE FAILURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
+ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND
+INGRES AND COROT
+MONET, SISLEY, PISSARO, AND THE DECADENCE
+OUR ACADEMICIANS
+THE ORGANISATION OF ART
+ART AND SCIENCE
+ROYALTY IN ART
+ART PATRONS
+PICTURE DEALERS
+MR. BURNE-JONES AND THE ACADEMY
+THE ALDERMAN IN ART
+RELIGIOSITY IN ART
+THE CAMERA IN ART
+THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB
+A GREAT ARTIST
+NATIONALITY IN ART
+SEX IN ART
+MR. STEER'S EXHIBITION
+CLAUDE MONET
+NOTES--
+  MR. MARK FISHER
+  A PORTRAIT BY MR. SARGENT
+  AN ORCHID BY MR. JAMES
+  THE WHISTLER ALBUM
+  INGRES
+SOME JAPANESE PRINTS
+NEW ART CRITICISM
+LONG AGO IN ITALY
+
+
+
+
+WHISTLER.
+
+
+I have studied Mr. Whistler and thought about him this many a year.
+His character was for a long time incomprehensible to me; it contained
+elements apparently so antagonistic, so mutually destructive, that I
+had to confess my inability to bring him within any imaginable
+psychological laws, and classed him as one of the enigmas of life. But
+Nature is never illogical; she only seems so, because our sight is not
+sufficient to see into her intentions; and with study my psychological
+difficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely
+understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and
+discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the
+strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and
+consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions
+are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking
+at the pictures I see the man.
+
+But at the outset the difficulties were enormous. It was like a
+newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters.
+Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite so
+full of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only just
+falling short of these masters at the point where they were strongest,
+but plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtle
+happiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to a
+newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he was
+launching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguish
+between an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing! Here was a man who,
+though he had spent the afternoon painting like the greatest, would
+spend his evenings in frantic disputes over dinner-tables about the
+ultimate ownership of a mild joke, possibly good enough for _Punch_,
+something that any one might have said, and that most of us having
+said it would have forgotten! It will be conceded that such
+divagations are difficult to reconcile with the possession of artistic
+faculties of the highest order.
+
+The "Ten o'clock" contained a good deal of brilliant writing,
+sparkling and audacious epigram, but amid all its glitter and "go"
+there are statements which, coming from Mr. Whistler, are as
+astonishing as a denial of the rotundity of the earth would be in a
+pamphlet bearing the name of Professor Huxley. Mr. Whistler is only
+serious in his art--a grave fault according to academicians, who are
+serious in everything except their "art". A very boyish utterance is
+the statement that such a thing as an artistic period has never been
+known.
+
+One rubbed one's eyes; one said, Is this a joke, and, if so, where is
+the point of it? And then, as if not content with so much mystification,
+Mr. Whistler assured his ten o'clock audience that there was no such
+thing as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of
+English mathematics as of English art. We do not stop to inquire if
+such answers contain one grain of truth; we know they do not--we stop
+to consider them because we know that the criticism of a creative artist
+never amounts to more than an ingenious defence of his own work--an
+ingenious exaltation of a weakness (a weakness which perhaps none
+suspects but himself) into a conspicuous merit.
+
+Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and
+England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for
+there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the
+north, the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all
+that is great in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and
+fearing that it might be used as an argument against his art, Mr.
+Whistler threw over the entire history, not only of art, but of the
+world; and declared boldly that art was, like science, not national,
+but essentially cosmopolitan; and then, becoming aware of the anomaly
+of his genius in his generation, Mr. Whistler undertook to explain
+away the anomaly by ignoring the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the
+fifteenth century in Italy, and the seventeenth in Holland, and humbly
+submitting that artists never appeared in numbers like swallows, but
+singly like aerolites. Now our task is not to disprove these
+statements, but to work out the relationship between the author of the
+"Butterfly Letters" and the painter of the portrait of "The Mother",
+"Lady Archibald Campbell", "Miss Alexander", and the other forty-one
+masterpieces that were on exhibition in the Goupil galleries.
+
+There is, however, an intermediate step, which is to point out the
+intimate relationship between the letter-writer and the physical man.
+Although there is no internal evidence to show that the pictures were
+not painted by a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or a
+Westernised Japanese, it would be impossible to read any one of the
+butterfly-signed letters without feeling that the author was a man of
+nerves rather than a man of muscle, and, while reading, we should
+involuntarily picture him short and thin rather than tall and
+stalwart. But what has physical condition got to do with painting? A
+great deal. The greatest painters, I mean the very greatest--Michael
+Angelo, Velasquez, and Rubens--were gifted by Nature with as full a
+measure of health as of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled
+more those of bulls than of men. Michael Angelo lay on his back for
+three years painting the Sistine Chapel. Rubens painted a life-size
+figure in a morning of pleasant work, and went out to ride in the
+afternoon. But Nature has dowered Mr. Whistler with only genius. His
+artistic perceptions are moreexquisite than Velasquez's. He knows as
+much, possibly even a little more, and yet the result is never quite
+equal. Why? A question of health. _C'est un tempérament de chatte_. He
+cannot pass from masterpiece to masterpiece like Velasquez. The
+expenditure of nerve-force necessary to produce such a work as the
+portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell or Miss Alexander exhausts him,
+and he is obliged to wait till Nature recoups herself; and these
+necessary intervals he has employed in writing letters signed
+"Butterfly" to the papers, quarrelling with Oscar over a few mild
+jokes, explaining his artistic existence, at the expense of the entire
+artistic history of the world, collecting and classifying the
+stupidities of the daily and weekly press.
+
+But the lesser side of a man of genius is instructive to study--indeed,
+it is necessary that we should study it if we would thoroughly
+understand his genius. "No man," it has been very falsely said, "is a
+hero to his _valet de chambre_." The very opposite is the truth. Man
+will bow the knee only to his own image and likeness. The deeper the
+humanity, the deeper the adoration; and from this law not even divinity
+is excepted. All we adore is human, and through knowledge of the flesh
+that grovels we may catch sight of the soul ascending towards the
+divine stars.
+
+And so the contemplation of Mr. Whistler, the author of the "Butterfly
+Letters", the defender of his little jokes against the plagiarising
+tongue, should stimulate rather than interrupt our prostrations. I
+said that Nature had dowered Mr. Whistler with every gift except that
+of physical strength. If Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of
+Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Hals, the Letters would never have been
+written. They were the safety-valve by which his strained nerves found
+relief from the intolerable tension of the masterpiece. He has not the
+bodily strength to pass from masterpiece to masterpiece, as did the
+great ones of old time. In the completed picture slight traces of his
+agony remain. But painting is the most indiscreet of all the arts, and
+here and there an omission or a feeble indication reveal the painter
+to us in moments of exasperated impotence. To understand Mr.
+Whistler's art you must understand his body. I do not mean that Mr.
+Whistler has suffered from bad health--his health has always been
+excellent; all great artists have excellent health, but his
+constitution is more nervous than robust. He is even a strong man, but
+he is lacking in weight. Were he six inches taller, and his bulk
+proportionately increased, his art would be different. Instead of
+having painted a dozen portraits, every one--even the mother and Miss
+Alexander, which I personally take to be the two best--a little
+febrile in its extreme beauty, whilst some, masterpieces though they
+be, are clearly touched with weakness, and marked with hysteria--Mr.
+Whistler would have painted a hundred portraits, as strong, as
+vigorous, as decisive, and as easily accomplished as any by Velasquez
+or Hals. But if Nature had willed him so, I do not think we should
+have had the Nocturnes, which are clearly the outcome of a
+highly-strung, bloodless nature whetted on the whetstone of its own
+weakness to an exasperated sense of volatile colour and evanescent
+light. It is hardly possible to doubt that this is so when we look on
+these canvases, where, in all the stages of her repose, the night
+dozes and dreams upon our river--a creole in Nocturne 34, upon whose
+trembling eyelids the lustral moon is shining; a quadroon in Nocturne
+17, who turns herself out of the light anhungered and set upon some
+feast of dark slumber. And for the sake of these gem-like pictures,
+whose blue serenities are comparable to the white perfections of
+Athenian marbles, we should have done well to yield a littlestrength
+in portraiture, if the distribution of Mr. Whistler's genius had been
+left in our hands. So Nature has done her work well, and we have no
+cause to regret the few pounds of flesh that she withheld. A few
+pounds more of flesh and muscle, and we should have had another
+Velasquez; but Nature shrinks from repetition, and at the last moment
+she said, "The world has had Velasquez, another would be superfluous:
+let there be Jimmy Whistler."
+
+In the Nocturnes Mr. Whistler stands alone, withouta rival. In
+portraits he is at his best when they are near to his Nocturnes in
+intention, when the theme lends itself to an imaginative and
+decorative treatment; for instance, as in the mother or Miss
+Alexander. Mr. Whistler is at his worst when he is frankly realistic.
+I have seen pictures by Mr. Henry Moore that I like better than "The
+Blue Wave". Nor does Mr. Whistler seem to me to reach his highest
+level in any one of the three portraits--Lady Archibald Campbell,
+Miss Rose Corder, and "the lady in the fur jacket". I know that Mr.
+Walter Sickert considers the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell to be
+Mr. Whistler's finest portrait. I submit, however, that the attitude
+is theatrical and not very explicit. It is a movement that has not
+been frankly observed, nor is it a movement that has been frankly
+imagined. It has none of the artless elegance of Nature; it is full of
+studio combinations; and yet it is not a frankly decorative
+arrangement, as the portrait of the mother or Miss Alexander. When
+Hals painted his Burgomasters, he was careful to place them in
+definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt
+either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time
+and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the
+painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one
+of conventional repose.
+
+Lady Archibald Campbell is represented in violent movement, looking
+backwards over her shoulder as she walks up the picture; yet there is
+nothing to show that she is not standing on the low table on which the
+model poses, and the few necessary indications are left out because
+they would interfere with the general harmony of his picture; because,
+if the table on which she is standing were indicated, the movement of
+outstretched arm would be incomprehensible. The hand, too, is somewhat
+uncertain, undetermined, and a gesture is meaningless that the hand
+does not determine and complete. I do not speak of the fingers of the
+right hand, which are non-existent; after a dozen attempts to paint
+the gloved hand, only an approximate result was obtained. Look at the
+ear, and say that the painter's nerves did not give wayonce or twice.
+And the likeness is vague and shadowy; she is only fairly
+representative of her class. We see fairly well that she is a lady _du
+grand monde_, who is, however, not without knowledge of _les environs
+du monde_. But she is hardly English--she might be a French woman or
+an American. She is a sort of hybrid. Miss Rose Corder and "the lady
+in the fur jacket" are equally cosmopolitan; so, too, is Miss
+Alexander. Only once has Mr. Whistler expressed race, and that was in
+his portrait of his mother. Then these three ladies--Miss Corder, Lady
+Archibald Campbell, and "the lady in the fur jacket"--wear the same
+complexion: a pale yellow complexion, burnt and dried. With this
+conventional tint he obtains unison and a totality of effect; but he
+obtains this result at the expense of truth. Hals and Velasquez
+obtained the same result, without, however, resorting to such
+meretricious methods.
+
+The portrait of the mother is, as every one knows, in the Luxemburg;
+but the engraving reminds us of the honour which France has done, but
+which we failed to do, to the great painter of the nineteenth century;
+and after much hesitation and arguing with myself I feel sure that on
+the whole this picture is the painter's greatest work in portraiture.
+We forget relations, friends, perhaps even our parents; but that
+picture we never forget; it is for ever with us, in sickness and in
+health; and in moments of extreme despair, when life seems hopeless,
+the strange magic of that picture springs into consciousness, and we
+wonder by what strange wizard craft was accomplished the marvellous
+pattern on the black curtain that drops past the engraving on the
+wall. We muse on the extraordinary beauty of that grey wall, on the
+black silhouette sitting so tranquilly, on the large feet on a
+foot-stool, on the hands crossed, on the long black dress that fills
+the picture with such solemn harmony. Then mark the transition from
+grey to white, and how _le ton local_ is carried through the entire
+picture, from the highest light to the deepest shadow. Note the
+tenderness of that white cap, the white lace cuffs, the certainty, the
+choice, and think of anything if you can, even in the best Japanese
+work, more beautiful, more delicate, subtle, illusive, certain in its
+handicraft; and if the lace cuffs are marvellous, the delicate hands
+of a beautiful old age lying in a small lace handkerchief are little
+short of miraculous. They are not drawn out in anatomical diagram, but
+appear and disappear, seen here on the black dress, lost there in the
+small white handkerchief. And when we study the faint, subtle outline
+of the mother's face, we seem to feel that there the painter has told
+the story of his soul more fully than elsewhere. That soul, strangely
+alive to all that is delicate and illusive in Nature, found perhaps
+its fullest expression in that grave old Puritan lady looking through
+the quiet refinement of her grey room, sitting in solemn profile in
+all the quiet habit of her long life.
+
+Compared with later work, the execution is "tighter", if I may be
+permitted an expression which will be understood in studios; we are
+very far indeed from the admirable looseness of handling which is the
+charm of the portrait of Miss Rose Corder. There every object is born
+unconsciously beneath the passing of the brush. If not less certain,
+the touch in the portrait of the mother is less prompt; but the
+painter's vision is more sincere and more intense. And to those who
+object to the artificiality of the arrangement, I reply that if the
+old lady is sitting in a room artificially arranged, Lady Archibald
+Campbell may be said to be walking through incomprehensible space. But
+what really decides me to place this portrait above the others is the
+fact that while painting his mother's portrait he was unquestionably
+absorbed in his model; and absorption in the model is perhaps the
+first quality in portrait-painting.
+
+Still, for my own personal pleasure, to satisfy the innermost cravings
+of my own soul, I would choose to live with the portrait of Miss
+Alexander. Truly, this picture seems to me the most beautiful in the
+world. I know very well that it has not the profound beauty of the
+Infantes by Velasquez in the Louvre; but for pure magic of inspiration,
+is it not more delightful? Just as Shelley's "Sensitive Plant" thrills
+the innermost sense like no other poem in the language, the portrait
+of Miss Alexander enchants with the harmony of colour, with the melody
+of composition.
+
+Strangely original, a rare and unique thing, is this picture, yet we
+know whence it came, and may easily appreciate the influences that
+brought it into being. Exquisite and happy combination of the art of
+an entire nation and the genius of one man-the soul of Japan incarnate
+in the body of the immortal Spaniard. It was Japan that counselled the
+strange grace of the silhouette, and it was that country, too, that
+inspired in a dim, far-off way those subtly sweet and magical passages
+from grey to green, from green again to changing evanescent grey. But
+a higher intelligence massed and impelled those chords of green and
+grey than ever manifested itself in Japanese fan or screen; the means
+are simpler, the effect is greater, and by the side of this picture
+the best Japanese work seems only facile superficial improvisation. In
+the picture itself there is really little of Japan. The painter merely
+understood all that Japan might teach. He went to the very root,
+appropriating only the innermost essence of its art. We Westerns had
+thought it sufficient to copy Nature, but the Japanese knew it was
+better to observe Nature. The whole art of Japan is selection, and
+Japan taught Mr. Whistler, or impressed upon Mr. Whistler, the
+imperative necessity of selection. No Western artist of the present or
+of past time--no, not Velasquez himself--ever selected from the model
+so tenderly as Mr. Whistler; Japan taught him to consider Nature as a
+storehouse whence the artist may pick and choose, combining the
+fragments of his choice into an exquisite whole. Sir John Millais' art
+is the opposite; there we find no selection; the model is copied--and
+sometimes only with sufficient technical skill.
+
+But this picture is throughout a selection from the model; nowhere has
+anything been copied brutally, yet the reality of the girl is not
+sacrificed.
+
+The picture represents a girl of ten or eleven. She is dressed
+according to the fashion of twenty years ago--a starched muslin frock,
+a small overskirt pale brown, white stockings, square-toed black
+shoes. She stands, her left foot advanced, holding in her left hand a
+grey felt hat adorned with a long plume reaching nearly to the ground.
+The wall behind her is grey with a black wainscot. On the left, far
+back in the picture, on a low stool, some grey-green drapery strikes
+the highest note of colour in the picture. On the right, in the
+foreground, some tall daisies come into the picture, and two
+butterflies flutter over the girl's blonde head. This picture seems to
+exist principally in the seeing! I mean that the execution is so
+strangely simple that the thought, "If I could only see the model like
+that, I think Icould do it myself", comes spontaneously into the mind.
+And this spontaneous thought is excellent criticism, for three-parts
+of Mr. Whistler's art lies in the seeing; no one ever saw Nature so
+artistically. Notice on the left the sharp line of the white frock
+cutting against the black wainscoting. Were that line taken away, how
+much would the picture lose! Look at the leg that is advanced, and
+tell me if you can detect the modelling. There is modelling, I know,
+but there are no vulgar roundnesses. Apparently, only a flat tint; but
+there is on the bone a light, hardly discernible; and this light is
+sufficient. And the leg that is turned away, the thick, chubby ankle
+of the child, how admirable in drawing; and that touch of darker
+colour, how it tells the exact form of the bone! To indicate is the
+final accomplishment of the painter's art, and I know no indication
+like that ankle bone. And now passing from the feet to the face,
+notice, I beg of you to notice--it is one of the points in the
+picture--that jaw bone. The face is seen in three-quarter, and to
+focus the interest in the face the painter has slightly insisted on
+the line of the jaw bone, which, taken in conjunction with the line of
+the hair, brings into prominence the oval of the face. In Nature that
+charming oval only appeared at moments. The painter seized one of
+those moments, and called it into our consciousness as a musician with
+certain finger will choose to give prominence to a certain note in a
+chord.
+
+There must have been a day in Mr. Whistler's life when the artists of
+Japan convinced him once and for ever of the primary importance of
+selection. In Velasquez, too, there is selection, and very often it is
+in the same direction as Mr. Whistler's, but the selection is never, I
+think, so much insisted upon; and sometimes in Velasquez there is, as
+in the portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, hardly any
+selection--I mean, of course, conscious selection. Velasquez sometimes
+brutally accepted Nature for what she was worth; this Mr. Whistler
+never does. But it was Velasquez that gave consistency and strength to
+what in Mr. Whistler might have run into an art of trivial but
+exquisite decoration. Velasquez, too, had a voice in the composition
+of the palette generally, so sober, so grave. The palette of Velasquez
+is the opposite of the palette of Rubens; the fantasy of Rubens'
+palette created the art of Watteau, Turner, Gainsborough; it obtained
+throughout the eighteenth century in England and in France. Chardin
+was the one exception. Alone amid the eighteenth century painters he
+chose the palette of Velasquez in preference to that of Rubens, and in
+the nineteenth century Whistler too has chosen it. It was Velasquez
+who taught Mr. Whistler that flowing, limpid execution. In the
+painting of that blonde hair there is something more than a souvenir
+of the blonde hair of the Infante in the _salle carrée_ in the Louvre.
+There is also something of Velasquez in the black notes of the shoes.
+Those blacks--are they not perfectly observed? How light and dry the
+colour is! How heavy and shiny it would have become in other hands!
+Notice, too, that in the frock nowhere is there a single touch of pure
+white, and yet it is all white--a rich, luminous white that makes
+every other white in the gallery seem either chalky or dirty. What an
+enchantment and a delight the handling is! How flowing, how supple,
+infinitely and beautifully sure, the music of perfect accomplishment!
+In the portrait of the mother the execution seems slower, hardly so
+spontaneous. For this, no doubt, the subject is accountable. But this
+little girl is the very finest flower, and the culminating point of
+Mr. Whistler's art. The eye travels over the canvas seeking a fault.
+In vain; nothing has been omitted that might have been included,
+nothing has been included that might have been omitted. There is much
+in Velasquez that is stronger, but nothing in this world ever seemed
+to me so perfect as this picture.
+
+The portrait of Carlyle has been painted about an arabesque similar, I
+might almost say identical, to that of the portrait of the mother. But
+as is usually the case, the attempt to repeat a success has resulted a
+failure. Mr. Whistler has sought to vary the arabesque in the
+direction of greater naturalness. He has broken the severity of the
+line, which the lace handkerchief and the hands scarcely stayed in the
+first picture, by placing the philosopher's hat upon his knees, he has
+attenuated the symmetry of the picture-frames on the walls, and has
+omitted the black curtain which drops through the earlier picture. And
+all these alterations seemed to me like so many leaks through which
+the eternal something of the first design has run out. A pattern like
+that of the egg and dart cannot be disturbed, and Columbus himself
+cannot rediscover America. And, turning from the arabesque to the
+painting, we notice at once that the balance of colour, held with such
+exquisite grace by the curtain on one side and the dress on the other,
+is absent in the later work; and if we examine the colours separately
+we cannot fail to apprehend the fact that the blacks in the later are
+not nearly so beautiful as those in the earlier picture. The blacks of
+the philosopher's coat and rug are neither as rich, not as rare, nor
+as deep as the blacks of the mother's gown. Never have the vital
+differences and the beauty of this colour been brought out as in that
+gown and that curtain, never even in Hals, who excels all other
+painters in this use of black. Mr. Whistler's failure with the first
+colour, when we compare the two pictures, is exceeded by his failure
+with the second colour. We miss the beauty of those extraordinary and
+exquisite high notes--the cap and cuffs; and the place of the rich,
+palpitating greys, so tremulous in the background of the earlier
+picture, is taken by an insignificant grey that hardly seems necessary
+or helpful to the coat and rug, and is only just raised out of the
+commonplace by the dim yellow of two picture-frames. It must be
+admitted, however, that the yellow is perfectly successful; it may be
+almost said to be what is most attractive in the picture. The greys in
+chin, beard, and hair must, however, be admitted to be beautiful,
+although they are not so full of charm as the greys in the portrait of
+Miss Alexander.
+
+But if Mr. Whistler had only failed in these matters, he might have
+still produced a masterpiece. But there is a graver criticism to be
+urged against the picture. A portrait is an exact reflection of the
+painter's state of soul at the moment of sitting down to paint. We
+read in the picture what he really desired; for what he really desired
+is in the picture, and his hesitations tell us what he only desired
+feebly. Every passing distraction, every weariness, every loss of
+interest in the model, all is written upon the canvas. Above all, he
+tells us most plainly what he thought about his model--whether he was
+moved by love or contempt; whether his moods were critical or
+reverential. And what the canvas under consideration tells most
+plainly is that Mr. Whistler never forgot his own personality in that
+of the ancient philosopher. He came into the room as chirpy and
+anecdotal as usual, in no way discountenanced or put about by the
+presence of his venerable and illustrious sitter. He had heard that
+the Chelsea sage wrote histories which were no doubt very learned, but
+he felt no particular interest in the matter. Of reverence, respect,
+or intimate knowledge of Carlyle there is no trace on the canvas; and
+looked at from this side the picture may be said to be the most
+American of all Mr. Whistler's works. "I am quite as big a man as
+you", to put it bluntly, was Mr. Whistler's attitude of mind while
+painting Carlyle. I do not contest the truth of the opinion. I merely
+submit that that is not the frame of mind in which great portraiture
+is done.
+
+The drawing is large, ample, and vigorous, beautifully understood, but
+not very profound or intimate: the picture seems to have been
+accomplished easily, and in excellent health and spirits. The painting
+is in Mr. Whistler's later and most characteristic manner. For many
+years--for certainly twenty years--his manner has hardly varied at
+all. He uses his colour very thin, so thinly that it often hardly
+amounts to more than a glaze, and painting is laid over painting, like
+skin upon skin. Regarded merely as brushwork, the face of the sage
+could hardly be surpassed; the modelling is that beautiful flat
+modelling, of which none except Mr. Whistler possesses the secrets.
+What the painter saw he rendered with incomparable skill. The vision
+of the rugged pensiveness of the old philosophers is as beautiful and
+as shallow as a page of De Quincey. We are carried away in a flow of
+exquisite eloquence, but the painter has not told us one significant
+fact about his model, his nationality, his temperament, his rank, his
+manner of life. We learn in a general way that he was a thinker; but
+it would have been impossible to draw the head at all and conceal so
+salient a characteristic. Mr. Whistler's portrait reveals certain
+general observations of life; but has he given one single touch
+intimately characteristic of his model?
+
+But if the portrait of Carlyle, when looked at from a certain side,
+must be admitted to be not wholly satisfactory, what shall be said of
+the portrait of Lady Meux? The dress is a luminous and harmonious
+piece of colouring, the material has its weight and its texture and
+its character of fold; but of the face it is difficult to say more
+than that it keeps its place in the picture. Very often the faces in
+Mr. Whistler's portraits are the least interesting part of the
+picture; his sitter's face does not seem to interest him more than the
+cuffs, the carpet, the butterfly, which hovers about the screen. After
+this admission, it will seem to many that it is waste of time to
+consider further Mr. Whistler's claim to portraiture. This is not so.
+Mr. Whistler is a great portrait painter, though he cannot take
+measurements or follow an outline like Holbein.
+
+Like most great painters, he has known how to introduce harmonious
+variation into his style by taking from others just as much of their
+sense of beauty as his own nature might successfully assimilate. I
+have spoken of his assimilation and combination of the art of
+Velasquez, and the entire art of Japan, but a still more striking
+instance of the power of assimilation, which, strange as it may seem,
+only the most original natures possess, is to hand in the early but
+extremely beautiful picture, _La femme en blanc_. In the Chelsea
+period of his life Mr. Whistler saw a great deal of that singular man,
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Intensely Italian, though he had never seen
+Italy; and though writing no language but ours, still writing it with
+a strange hybrid grace, bringing into it the rich and voluptuous
+colour and fragrance of the south, expressing in picture and poem
+nothing but an uneasy haunting sense of Italy--opulence of women, not
+of the south, nor yet of the north, Italian celebration, mystic altar
+linen, and pomp of gold vestment and legendary pane. Of such hauntings
+Rossetti's life and art were made.
+
+His hold on poetic form was surer than his hold on pictorial form,
+wherein his art is hardly more than poetic reminiscence of Italian
+missal and window pane. Yet even as a painter his attractiveness
+cannot be denied, nor yet the influence he has exercised on English
+art. Though he took nothing from his contemporaries, all took from
+him, poets and painters alike. Not even Mr. Whistler could refrain,
+and in _La femme en blanc_ he took from Rossetti his manner of feeling
+and seeing. The type of woman is the same--beauty of dreaming eyes and
+abundant hair. And in this picture we find a poetic interest, a moral
+sense, if I may so phrase it, nowhere else to be detected, though you
+search Mr. Whistler's work from end to end. The woman stands idly
+dreaming by her mirror. She is what is her image in the glass, an
+appearance that has come, and that will go leaving no more trace than
+her reflection on the glass when she herself has moved away. She sees
+in her dream the world like passing shadows thrown on an illuminated
+cloth. She thinks of her soft, white, and opulent beauty which fills
+her white dress; her chin is lifted, and above her face shines the
+golden tumult of her hair.
+
+The picture is one of the most perfect that Mr. Whistler has painted;
+it is as perfect as the mother or Miss Alexander, and though it has
+not the beautiful, flowing, supple execution of the "symphony in
+white", I prefer it for sake of its sheer perfection. It is more
+perfect than the symphony in white, though there is nothing in it
+quite so extraordinary as the loving gaiety of the young girl's face.
+The execution of that face is as flowing, as spontaneous, and as
+bright as the most beautiful day of May. The white drapery clings like
+haze about the edge of the woods, and the flesh tints are pearly and
+evanescent as dew, and soft as the colour of a flowering mead. But the
+kneeling figure is not so perfect, and that is why I reluctantly give
+my preference to the woman by the mirror. Turning again to this
+picture, I would fain call attention to the azalias, which, in
+irresponsible decorative fashion, come into the right-hand corner. The
+delicate flowers show bright and clear on the black-leaded fire-grate;
+and it is in the painting of such detail that Mr. Whistler exceeds all
+painters. For purity of colour and the beauty of pattern, these
+flowers are surely as beautiful as anything that man's hand has ever
+accomplished.
+
+Mr. Whistler has never tried to be original. He has never attempted to
+reproduce on canvas the discordant and discrepant extravagancies of
+Nature as M. Besnard and Mr. John Sargent have done. His style has
+always been marked by such extreme reserve that the critical must have
+sometimes inclined to reproach him with want of daring, and ask
+themselves where was the innovator in this calculated reduction of
+tones, in these formal harmonies, in this constant synthesis, sought
+with far more disregard for superfluous detail than Hals, for
+instance, had ever dared to show. The still more critical, while
+admitting the beauty and the grace of this art, must have often asked
+themselves what, after all, has this painter invented, what new
+subject-matter has he introduced into art?
+
+It was with the night that Mr. Whistler set his seal and sign-manual
+upon art; above all others he is surely the interpreter of the night.
+Until he came the night of the painter was as ugly and insignificant
+as any pitch barrel; it was he who first transferred to canvas the
+blue transparent darkness which folds the world from sunset to
+sunrise. The purple hollow, and all the illusive distances of the
+gas-lit river, are Mr. Whistler's own. It was not the unhabited night
+of lonely plain and desolate tarn that he chose to interpret, but the
+difficult populous city night--the night of tall bridges and vast
+water rained through with lights red and grey, the shores lined with
+the lamps of the watching city. Mr. Whistler's night is the vast blue
+and golden caravanry, where the jaded and the hungry and the
+heavy-hearted lay down their burdens, and the contemplative freed from
+the deceptive reality of the day understand humbly and pathetically
+the casualness of our habitation, and the limitlessreality of a plan,
+the intention of which we shall never know. Mr. Whistler's nights are
+the blue transparent darknesses which are half of the world's life.
+Sometimes he foregoes even the aid of earthly light, and his picture
+is but luminous blue shadow, delicately graduated, as in the nocturne
+in M. Duret's collection--purple above and below, a shadow in the
+middle of the picture--a little less and there would be nothing.
+
+There is the celebrated nocturne in the shape of a T--one pier of the
+bridge and part of the arch, the mystery of the barge, and the figure
+guiding the barge in the current, the strange luminosity of the
+fleeting river! lines of lights, vague purple and illusive distance,
+and all is so obviously beautiful that one pauses to consider how
+there could have been stupidity enough to deny it. Of less dramatic
+significance, but of equal esthetic value, is the nocturne known as
+"the Cremorne lights". Here the night is strangely pale; one of those
+summer nights when a slight veil of darkness is drawn for an hour or
+more across the heavens. Another of quite extraordinary beauty, even
+in a series of extraordinarily beautiful things, is "Night on the
+Sea". The waves curl white in the darkness, and figures are seen as in
+dreams; lights burn low, ships rock in the offing, and beyond them,
+lost in the night, a vague sense of illimitable sea.
+
+Out of the night Mr. Whistler has gathered beauty as august as Phidias
+took from Greek youths. Nocturne II is the picture which Professor
+Ruskin declared to be equivalent to flinging a pot of paint in the
+face of the public. But that black night, filling the garden even to
+the sky's obliteration, is not black paint but darkness. The whirl of
+the St. Catherine wheel in the midst of this darkness amounts to a
+miracle, and the exquisite drawing of the shower of falling fire would
+arouse envy in Rembrandt, and prompt imitation. The line of the
+watching crowd is only just indicated, and yet the garden is crowded.
+There is another nocturne in which rockets are rising and falling, and
+the drawing of these two showers of fire is so perfect, that when you
+turn quickly towards the picture, the sparks really do ascend and
+descend.
+
+More than any other painter, Mr. Whistler's influence has made itself
+felt on English art. More than any other man, Mr. Whistler has helped
+to purge art of the vice of subject and belief that the mission of the
+artist is to copy nature. Mr. Whistler's method is more learned, more
+co-ordinate than that of any other painter of our time; all is
+preconceived from the first touch to the last, nor has there ever been
+much change in the method, the painting has grown looser, but the
+method was always the same; to have seen him paint at once is to have
+seen him paint at every moment of his life. Never did a man seem more
+admirably destined to found a school which should worthily carry on
+the tradition inherited from the old masters and represented only by
+him. All the younger generation has accepted him as master, and that
+my generation has not profited more than it has, leads me to think,
+however elegant, refined, emotional, educated it may be, and anxious
+to achieve, that it is lacking in creative force, that it is, in a
+word, slightly too slight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAVANNES, MILLET, AND MANET.
+
+
+Of the great painters born before 1840 only two now are living, Puvis
+de Chavannes and Degas. It is true to say of Chavannes that he is the
+only man alive to whom a beautiful building might be given for
+decoration without fear that its beauty would be disgraced. He is the
+one man alive who can cover twenty feet of wall or vaulted roof with
+decoration that will neither deform the grandeur nor jar the greyness
+of the masonry. Mural decoration in his eyes is not merely a picture
+let into a wall, nor is it necessarily mural decoration even if it be
+painted on the wall itself: it is mural decoration if it form part of
+the wall, if it be, if I may so express myself, a variant of the
+stonework. No other painter ever kept this end so strictly before his
+eyes. For this end Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a
+monochrome, for this end he models in two flat tints, for this end he
+draws in huge undisciplined masses.
+
+Let us examine his palette: many various greys, some warmed with
+vermilion, some with umber, and many more that are mere mixtures of
+black and white, large quantities of white, for Chavannes paints in a
+high key, wishing to disturb the colour of the surrounding stone as
+little as may be. Grey and blue are the natural colours of building
+stone; when the subject will not admit of subterfuge, he will
+introduce a shade of pale green, as in his great decoration entitled
+"Summer"; but grey is always the foundation of his palette, and it
+fills the middle of the picture. The blues are placed at the top and
+bottom, and he works between them in successive greys. The sky in the
+left-hand top corner is an ultramarine slightly broken with white; the
+blue gown at the bottom of the picture, not quite in the middle of the
+picture, a little on the right, is also ultramarine, and here the
+colour is used nearly in its first intensity. And the colossal woman
+who wears the blue gown leans against some grey forest tree trunk, and
+a great white primeval animal is what her forms and attitude suggest.
+There are some women about her, and they lie and sit in disconnected
+groups like fragments fallen from a pediment. Nor is any attempt made
+to relate, by the aid of vague look or gesture, this group in the
+foreground to the human hordes engaged in building enclosures in the
+middle distance. In Chavannes the composition is always as disparate
+as an early tapestry, and the drawing of the figures is almost as
+rude. If I may be permitted a French phrase, I will say _un peu
+sommaire_ quite unlike the beautiful simplifications of Raphael or
+Ingres, or indeed any of the great masters. They could simplify
+without becoming rudimentary; Chavannes cannot.
+
+And now a passing word about the handicraft, the manner of using the
+brush. Chavannes shares the modern belief-and only in this is he
+modern--that for the service of thought one instrument is as apt as
+another, and that, so long as that man's back--he who is pulling at
+the rope fastened at the tree's top branches--is filled in with two
+grey tints, it matters not at all how the task is accomplished. Truly
+the brush has plastered that back as a trowel might, and the result
+reminds one of stone and mortar, as Millet's execution reminds one of
+mud-pie making. The handicraft is as barbarous in Chavannes as it is
+in Millet, and we think of them more as great poets working in a not
+wholly sympathetic and, in their hands, somewhat rebellious material.
+Chavannes is as an epic poet whose theme is the rude grandeur of the
+primeval world, and who sang his rough narrative to a few chords
+struck on a sparely-stringed harp that his own hands have fashioned.
+And is not Millet a sort of French Wordsworth who in a barbarous
+Breton dialect has told us in infinitely touching strains of the noble
+submission of the peasant's lot, his unending labours and the
+melancholy solitude of the country.
+
+As poet-painters, none admires these great artists more than I, but
+the moment we consider them as painters we have to compare the
+handicraft of the decoration entitled "Summer" with that of Francis
+the First meeting Marie de Medicis; we have to compare the handicraft
+of the Sower and the Angelus with that of "Le Bon Bock" and "L'enfant
+à Pépée"; and the moment we institute such comparison does not the
+inferiority of Chavannes' and Millet's handicraft become visible even
+to the least initiated in the art of painting, and is not the
+conclusion forced upon us that however Manet may be judged inferior to
+Millet as a poet, as a painter he is easily his superior? And as
+Millet's and Chavannes' brush-work is deficient in beauty so is their
+drawing. Preferring decorative unity to completeness of drawing,
+Chavannes does not attempt more than some rudimentary indications.
+Millet seems even to have desired to omit technical beauty, so that he
+might concentrate all thought on the poetic synthesis he was gathering
+from the earth. Degas, on the contrary, draws for the sake of the
+drawing-The Ballet Girl, The Washerwoman, The Fat Housewife bathing
+herself, is only a pretext for drawing; and Degas chose these
+extraordinary themes because the drawing of the ballet girl and the
+fat housewife is less known than that of the nymph and the Spartan
+youth. Painters will understand what I mean by the drawing being "less
+known",--that knowledge of form which sustains the artist like a
+crutch in his examination of the model, and which as it were dictates
+to the eye what it must see. So the ballet girl was Degas' escapement
+from the thraldom of common knowledge. The ballet girl was virgin
+soil. In her meagre thwarted forms application could freely be made of
+the supple incisive drawing which bends to and flows with the
+character--that drawing of which Ingres was the supreme patron, and of
+which Degas is the sole inheritor.
+
+Until a few years ago Chavannes never sold a picture. Millet lived his
+life in penury and obscurity, but thirty years of persistent ridicule
+having failed to destroy Degas' genius, some recognition has been
+extended to it. The fate of all great artists in the nineteenth
+century is a score years of neglect and obloquy. They may hardly hope
+for recognition before they are fifty; some few cases point the other
+way, but very few--the rule is thirty years of neglect and obloquy.
+Then a flag of truce will be held out to the recalcitrant artist who
+cannot be prevented from painting beautiful pictures. "Come, let us be
+friends; let's kiss and make it up; send a picture to the academy;
+we'll hang it on the line, and make you an academician the first
+vacancy that occurs." To-day the academy would like to get Mr.
+Whistler, but Mr. Whistler replies to the academy as Degas replied to
+the government official who wanted a picture for the Luxembourg. _Non,
+je ne veux pas être conduit au poste par les sargents de ville
+d'aris_.
+
+To understand Manet's genius, the nineteenth century would have
+required ten years more than usual, for in Manet there is nothing but
+good painting, and there is nothing that the nineteenth century
+dislikes as much as good painting. In Whistler there is an exquisite
+and inveigling sense of beauty; in Degas there is an extraordinary
+acute criticism of life, and so the least brutal section of the public
+ended by pardoning Whistler his brush-work, and Degas his beautiful
+drawing. But in Manet there is nothing but good painting, and it is
+therefore possible that he might have lived till he was eighty without
+obtaining recognition. Death alone could accomplish the miracle of
+opening the public's eyes to his merits. During his life the excuse
+given for the constant persecution waged against him by the
+"authorities" was his excessive originality. But this was mere
+subterfuge; what was really hated-what made him so unpopular-was the
+extraordinary beauty of his handling. Whatever he painted became
+beautiful--his hand was dowered with the gift of quality, and there
+his art began and ended. His painting of still life never has been
+exceeded, and never will be. I remember a pear that used to hang in
+his studio. Hals would have taken his hat off to it.
+
+Twenty years ago Manet's name was a folly and a byword in the Parisian
+studios. The students of the Beaux Arts used to stand before his salon
+pictures and sincerely wonder how any one could paint like that; the
+students were quite sure that it was done for a joke, to attract
+attention; and then, not quite sincerely, one would say, "But I'll
+undertake to paint you three pictures a week like that." I say that
+the remark was never quite sincere, for I never heard it made without
+some one answering, "I don't think you could; just come and look at it
+again--there's more in it than you think." No doubt we thought Manet
+very absurd, but there was always something forced and artificial in
+our laughter and the ridicule we heaped upon him.
+
+But about that time my opinions were changing; and it was a great
+event in my life when Manet spoke to me in the cafe of the Nouvelle
+Athene. I knew it was Manet, he had been pointed out to me, and I had
+admired the finely-cut face from whose prominent chin a closely-cut
+blonde beard came forward; and the aquiline nose, the clear grey eyes,
+the decisive voice, the remarkable comeliness of the well-knit figure,
+scrupulously but simply dressed, represented a personality curiously
+sympathetic. On several occasions shyness had compelled me to abandon
+my determination to speak to him. But once he had spoken I entered
+eagerly into conversation, and next day I went to his studio. It was
+quite a simple place. Manet expended his aestheticism on his canvases,
+and not upon tapestries and inlaid cabinets. There was very little in
+his studio except his pictures: a sofa, a rocking-chair, a table for
+his paints, and a marble table on iron supports, such as one sees in
+cafés. Being a fresh-complexioned, fair-haired young man, the type
+most suitable to Manet's palette, he at once asked me to sit. His
+first intention was to paint me in a café; he had met me in a café,
+and he thought he could realise his impression of me in the first
+surrounding he had seen me in.
+
+The portrait did not come right; ultimately it was destroyed; but it
+gave me every opportunity of studying Manet's method of painting.
+Strictly speaking, he had no method; painting with him was a pure
+instinct. Painting was one of the ways his nature manifested itself.
+That frank, fearless, prompt nature manifested itself in everything
+that concerned him--in his large plain studio, full of light as a
+conservatory; in his simple, scrupulous clothes, and yet with a touch
+of the dandy about them; in decisive speech, quick, hearty, and
+informed with a manly and sincere understanding of life. Never was an
+artist's inner nature in more direct conformity with his work. There
+were no circumlocutions in Manet's nature, there were none in his art.
+
+The colour of my hair never gave me a thought until Manet began to
+paint it. Then the blonde gold that came up under his brush filled me
+with admiration, and I was astonished when, a few days after, I saw
+him scrape off the rough paint and prepare to start afresh.
+
+"Are you going to get a new canvas?"
+
+"No; this will do very well."
+
+"But you can't paint yellow ochre on yellow ochre without getting it
+dirty?"
+
+"Yes, I think I can. You go and sit down."
+
+Half-an-hour after he had entirely repainted the hair, and without
+losing anything of its brightness. He painted it again and again;
+every time it came out brighter and fresher, and the painting never
+seemed to lose anything in quality. That this portrait cost him
+infinite labour and was eventually destroyed matters nothing; my point
+is merely that he could paint yellow over yellow without getting the
+colour muddy. One day, seeing that I was in difficulties with a black,
+he took a brush from my hand, and it seemed to have hardly touched the
+canvas when the ugly heaviness of my tiresome black began to
+disappear. There came into it grey and shimmering lights, the shadows
+filled up with air, and silk seemed to float and rustle. There was no
+method-there was no trick; he merely painted. My palette was the same
+to him as his own; he did not prepare his palette; his colour did not
+exist on his palette before he put it on the canvas; but working under
+the immediate dictation of his eye, he snatched the tints
+instinctively, without premeditation. Ah! that marvellous hand, those
+thick fingers holding the brush so firmly-somewhat heavily; how
+malleable, how obedient, that most rebellious material, oil-colour,
+was to his touch. He did with it what he liked. I believe he could rub
+a picture over with Prussian blue without experiencing any
+inconvenience; half-an-hour after the colour would be fine and
+beautiful.
+
+And never did this mysterious power which produces what artists know
+as "quality" exist in greater abundance in any fingers than it did in
+the slow, thick fingers of Edouard Manet: never since the world began;
+not in Velasquez, not in Hals, not in Rubens, not in Titian. As an
+artist Manet could not compare with the least among these illustrious
+painters; but as a manipulator of oil-colour he never was and never
+will be excelled. Manet was born a painter as absolutely as any man
+that ever lived, so absolutely that a very high and lucid intelligence
+never for a moment came between him and the desire to put anything
+into his picture except good painting. I remember his saying to me, "I
+also tried to write, but I did not succeed; I never could do anything
+but paint." And what a splendid thing for an artist to be able to say.
+The real meaning of his words did not reach me till years after;
+perhaps I even thought at the time that he was disappointed that he
+could not write. I know now what was passing in his mind: _Je ne me
+suis pas trompé de métier_. How many of us can say as much? Go round a
+picture gallery, and of how many pictures, ancient or modern, can you
+stand before and say, _Voila un homme qui ne s'est pas trompé de
+métier?_
+
+Perhaps above all men of our generation Manet made the least mistake
+in his choice of a trade. Let those who doubt go and look at the
+beautiful picture of Boulogne Pier, now on view in Mr. Van
+Wesselingh's gallery, 26 Old Bond Street. The wooden pier goes right
+across the canvas; all the wood piers are drawn, there is no attempt
+to hide or attenuate their regularity. Why should Manet attenuate when
+he could fill the interspaces with the soft lapping of such exquisite
+blue sea-water. Above the piers there is the ugly yellow-painted rail.
+But why alter the colour when he could keep it in such exquisite
+value? On the canvas it is beautiful. In the middle of the pier there
+is a mast and a sail which does duty for an awning; perhaps it is only
+a marine decoration. A few loungers are on the pier--men and women in
+grey clothes. Why introduce reds and blues when he was sure of being
+able to set the little figures in their places, to draw them so
+firmly, and relieve the grey monotony with such beauty of execution?
+It would be vain to invent when so exquisite an execution is always at
+hand to relieve and to transform. Mr. Whistler would have chosen to
+look at the pier from a more fanciful point of view. Degas would have
+taken an odd corner; he would have cut the composition strangely, and
+commented on the humanity of the pier. But Manet just painted it
+without circumlocutions of any kind. The subject was void of pictorial
+relief. There was not even a blue space in the sky, nor yet a dark
+cloud. He took it as it was--a white sky, full of an inner radiance,
+two sailing-boats floating in mist of heat, one in shadow, the other
+in light. Vandervelde would seem trivial and precious beside painting
+so firm, so manly, so free from trick, so beautifully logical, and so
+unerring.
+
+Manet did not often paint sea-pieces. He is best known and is most
+admired as a portrait-painter, but from time to time he ventured to
+trust his painting to every kind of subject-I know even a cattle-piece
+by Manet--and his Christ watched over by angels in the tomb is one of
+his finest works. His Christ is merely a rather fat model sitting with
+his back against a wall, and two women with wings on either side of
+him. There is no attempt to suggest a Divine death or to express the
+Kingdom of Heaven on the angels' faces. But the legs of the man are as
+fine a piece of painting as has ever been accomplished.
+
+In an exhibition of portraits now open in Paris, entitled _Cent
+Chefs-d'Oeuvre_, Manet has been paid the highest honour; he himself
+would not demand a greater honour--his "Bon Bock" has been hung next
+to a celebrated portrait by Hals....
+
+Without seeing it, I know that the Hals is nobler, grander; I know,
+supposing the Hals to be a good one, that its flight is that of an
+eagle as compared with the flight of a hawk. The comparison is
+exaggerated; but, then, so are all comparisons. I also know that Hals
+does not tell us more about his old woman than Manet tells us about
+the man who sits so gravely by his glass of foaming ale, so clearly
+absorbed by it, so oblivious to all other joys but those that it
+brings him. Hals never placed any one more clearly in his favourite
+hour of the day, the well-desired hour, looked forward to perhaps
+since the beginning of the afternoon. In this marvellous portrait we
+read the age, the rank, the habits, the limitations, physical and
+mental, of the broad-faced man who sits so stolidly, his fat hand
+clasping his glass of foaming ale. Nothing has been omitted. We look
+at the picture, and the man and his environment become part of our
+perception of life. That stout, middle-aged man of fifty, who works
+all day in some small business, and goes every evening to his café to
+drink beer, will abide with us for ever. His appearance, and his mode
+of life, which his appearance so admirably expresses, can never become
+completely dissociated from our understanding of life. For Manet's
+"Bon Bock" is one of the eternal types, a permanent national
+conception, as inherent in French life as Polichinelle, Pierrot,
+Monsieur Prud'homme, or the Baron Hulot. I have not seen the portrait
+for fifteen or eighteen years, and yet I see it as well as if it were
+hung on the wall opposite the table on which I am writing this page. I
+can see that round, flat face, a little swollen with beer, the small
+eyes, the spare beard and moustaches. His feet are not in the picture,
+but I know how much he pays for his boots, and how they fit him. Nor
+did Hals ever paint better; I mean that nowhere in Hals will you find
+finer handling, or a more direct luminous or simple expression of what
+the eye saw. It has all the qualities I have enumerated, and yet it
+falls short of Hals. It has not the breadth and scope of the great
+Dutchman. There is a sense of effort, _on sent le souffle_, and in
+Hals one never does. It is more bound together, it does not flow with
+the mighty and luminous ease of the _chefs d'oeuvre_ at Haarlem.
+
+But is this Manet's final achievement, the last word he has to say? I
+think not. It was painted early in the sixties, probably about the
+same period as the Luxembourg picture, when the effects of his Spanish
+travel were wearing off, and Paris was beginning to command his art.
+Manet used to say, "When Degas was painting Semiramis I was painting
+modern Paris." It would have been more true to have said modern Spain.
+For it was in Spain that Manet found his inspiration. He had not been
+to Holland when he painted his Spanish pictures. Velasquez clearly
+inspired them; but there never was in his work any of the noble
+delicacies of the Spaniard; it was always nearer to the plainer and
+more--forgive the phrase--yokel-like eloquence of Hals. The art of
+Hals he seemed to have divined; it seems to have come instinctively to
+him.
+
+Manet went to Spain after a few months spent in Couture's studio. Like
+all the great artists of our time, he was self-educated--Whistler,
+Degas, Courbet, Corot, and Manet wasted little time in other men's
+studios. Soon after his return from Spain, by some piece of good luck,
+Manet was awarded _une mention honorable_ at the Salon for his
+portrait of a toreador. Why this honour was conferred upon him it is
+difficult to guess. It must have been the result of some special
+influence exerted at a special moment, for ever after--down to the
+year of his death--his pictures were considered as an excrescence on
+the annual exhibitions at the _Salon_. Every year--down to the year of
+his death--the jury, M. Bouguereau et Cie., lamented that they were
+powerless to reject these ridiculous pictures. Manet had been placed
+_hors concours_, and they could do nothing. They could do nothing
+except stand before his pictures and laugh. Oh, I remember it all very
+well. We were taught at the Beaux-Arts to consider Manet an absurd
+person or else an _épateur_, who, not being able to paint like M.
+Gérôme, determined to astonish. I remember perfectly well the derision
+with which those _chefs d'oeuvre_, "Yachting at Argenteuil" and "Le
+Linge", were received. They were in his last style--that bright, clear
+painting in which violet shadows were beginning to take the place of
+the conventional brown shadows, and the brush-work, too, was looser
+and more broken up; in a word, these pictures were the germ from which
+has sprung a dozen different schools, all the impressionism and other
+isms of modern French art. Before these works, in which the real Manet
+appeared for the first time, no one had a good word to say. To kill
+them more effectually, certain merits were even conceded to the "Bon
+Bock" and the Luxembourg picture.
+
+The "Bon Bock", as we have seen, at once challenges comparison with
+Hals. But in "Le Linge" no challenge is sent forth to any one; it is
+Manet, all Manet, and nothing but Manet. In this picture he expresses
+his love of the gaiety and pleasure of Parisian life. And this
+bright-faced, simple-minded woman, who stands in a garden crowded with
+the tallest sunflowers, the great flower-crowns drooping above her,
+her blue cotton dress rolled up to the elbows, her hands plunged in a
+small wash-tub in which she is washing some small linen, habit-shirts,
+pocket-handkerchiefs, collars, expresses the joy of homely life in the
+French suburb. Her home is one of good wine, excellent omelettes, soft
+beds; and the sheets, if they are a little coarse, are spotless, and
+retain an odour of lavender-sweetened cupboards. Her little child,
+about four years old, is with his mother in the garden; he has strayed
+into the foreground of the picture, just in front of the wash-tub, and
+he holds a great sunflower in his tiny hand. Beside this picture of
+such bright and happy aspect, the most perfect example of that _genre_
+known as _la peinture claire_, invented by Manet, and so infamously
+and absurdly practised by subsequent imitators--beside this picture so
+limpid, so fresh, so unaffected in its handling, a Courbet would seem
+heavy and dull, a sort of mock old master; a Corot would seem
+ephemeral and cursive; a Whistler would seem thin; beside this picture
+of such elegant and noble vision a Stevens would certainly seem
+odiously common. Why does not Liverpool or Manchester buy one of these
+masterpieces? If the blueness of the blouse frightens the
+administrators of these galleries, I will ask them--and perhaps this
+would be the more practical project--to consider the purchase of
+Manet's first and last historical picture, the death of the
+unfortunate Maximilian in Mexico. Under a high wall, over which some
+Mexicans are looking, Maximilian and two friends stand in front of the
+rifles. The men have just fired, and death clouds the unfortunate
+face. On the right a man stands cocking his rifle. Look at the
+movement of the hand, how well it draws back the hammer. The face is
+nearly in profile--how intent it is on the mechanism. And is not the
+drawing of the legs, the boots, the gaiters, the arms lifting the
+heavy rifle with slow deliberation, more massive, firm, and concise
+than any modern drawing? How ample and how exempt from all trick, and
+how well it says just what the painter wanted to say! This picture,
+too, used to hang in his studio. But the greater attractiveness of "Le
+Linge" prevented me from discerning its more solemn beauty. But last
+May I came across it unexpectedly, and after looking at it for some
+time the thought that came was--no one painted better, no one will
+ever paint better.
+
+The Luxembourg picture, although one of the most showy and the
+completest amongst Manet's masterpieces, is not, in my opinion, either
+the most charming or the most interesting; and yet it would be
+difficult to say that this of the many life-sized nudes that France
+has produced during the century is not the one we could least easily
+spare. Ingres' Source compares not with things of this century, but
+with the marbles of the fourth century B.C. Cabanel's Venus is a
+beautiful design, but its destruction would create no appreciable gap
+in the history of nineteenth century art. The destruction of "Olympe"
+would.
+
+The picture is remarkable not only for the excellence of the
+execution, but for a symbolic intention nowhere else to be found in
+Manet's works. The angels on either side of his dead Christ
+necessitated merely the addition of two pairs of wings--a convention
+which troubled him no more than the convention of taking off his hat
+on entering a church. But in "Olympe" we find Manet departing from the
+individual to the universal. The red-headed woman who used to dine at
+the _Ratmort_ does not lie on a modern bed but on the couch of all
+time; and she raises herself from amongst her cushions, setting forth
+her somewhat meagre nudity as arrogantly and with the same calm
+certitude of her sovereignty as the eternal Venus for whose prey is
+the flesh of all men born. The introduction of a bouquet bound up in
+large white paper does not prejudice the symbolic intention, and the
+picture would do well for an illustration to some poem to be found in
+_"Les fleurs du Mal"_. It may be worth while to note here that
+Baudelaire printed in his volume a quatrain inspired by one of Manet's
+Spanish pictures.
+
+But after this slight adventure into symbolism, Manet's eyes were
+closed to all but the visible world. The visible world of Paris he saw
+henceforth--truly, frankly, and fearlessly, and more beautifully than
+any of his contemporaries. Never before was a great man's mind so
+strictly limited to the range of what his eyes saw. Nature wished it
+so, and, having discovered nature's wish, Manet joined his desire with
+Nature's. I remember his saying as he showed me some illustrations he
+had done for Mallarme's translation of Edgar Poe's poem, "You'll admit
+that it doesn't give you much idea 'of a kingdom by the sea.'" The
+drawing represented the usual sea-side watering place--the beach with
+a nursemaid at full length; children building sand castles, and some
+small sails in the offing.
+
+So Manet was content to live by the sight, and by the sight alone; he
+was a painter, and had neither time nor taste for such ideals as Poe's
+magical Annabel Lee. Marvellous indeed must have been the eyes that
+could have persuaded such relinquishment. How marvellous they were we
+understand easily when we look at "Olympe". Eyes that saw truly, that
+saw beautifully and yet somewhat grossly. There is much vigour in the
+seeing, there is the exquisite handling of Hals, and there is the
+placing, the setting forth of figures on the canvas, which was as
+instinctively his as it was Titian's. Hals and Velasquez possessed all
+those qualities, and something more. They would not have been
+satisfied with that angular, presumptuous, and obvious drawing, harsh
+in its exterior limits and hollow within--the head a sort of
+convulsive abridgment, the hand void, and the fingers too, if we seek
+their articulations. An omission must not be mistaken for a
+simplification, and for all his omissions Manet strives to make amend
+by the tone. It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful
+syntheses than that pale yellow, a beautiful golden sensation, and the
+black woman, the attendant of this light of love, who comes to the
+couch with a large bouquet fresh from the boulevard, is certainly a
+piece of painting that Rubens and Titian would stop to admire.
+
+But when all has been said, I prefer Manet in the quieter and I think
+the more original mood in the portrait of his sister-in-law, Madame
+Morisot. The portrait is in M. Duret's collection; it hangs in a not
+too well lighted passage, and if I did not spend six or ten minutes in
+admiration before this picture, I should feel that some familiar
+pleasure had drifted out of my yearly visit to Paris. Never did a
+white dress play so important or indeed so charming a part in a
+picture. The dress is the picture--this common white dress, with black
+spots, _une robe a poix, une petite confection de soixante cinq
+francs_, as the French would say; and very far it is from all
+remembrance of the diaphanous, fairy-like skirts of our eighteenth
+century English school, but I swear to you no less charming. It is a
+very simple and yet a very beautiful reality. A lady, in white dress
+with black spots, sitting on a red sofa, a dark chocolate red, in the
+subdued light of her own quiet, prosaic French _appartment, le
+deuxième au dessus l'entre-sol_. The drawing is less angular, less
+constipated than that of "Olympe". How well the woman's body is in the
+dress! there is the bosom, the waist, the hips, the knees, and the
+white stockinged foot in the low shoe, coming from out the dress. The
+drawing about the hips and bosom undulates and floats, vague and yet
+precise, in a manner that recalls Harlem, and it is not until we turn
+to the face that we come upon ominous spaces unaccounted for, forms
+unexplained. The head is so charming that it seems a pity to press our
+examination further. But to understand Manet's deficiency is to
+understand the abyss that separates modern from ancient art, and the
+portrait of Madame Morisot explains them as well as another, for the
+deficiency I wish to point out exists in Manet's best portraits as
+well as in his worst. The face in this picture is like the face in
+every picture by Manet. Three or four points are seized, and the
+spaces between are left unaccounted for. Whistler has not the strength
+of Velasquez; Manet is not as complete as Hals.
+
+
+
+
+THE FAILURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+In the seventeenth century were Poussin and Claude; in the eighteenth
+Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, and many lesser lights--Fragonard, Pater,
+and Lancret. But notwithstanding the austere grandeur of Poussin and
+the beautiful, if somewhat too reasonable poetry of Claude, the
+infinite perfection of Watteau, the charm of that small French
+Velasquez Chardin, and the fascinations and essentially French genius
+of all this group (Poussin and Claude were entirely Roman), I think we
+must place France's artistic period in the nineteenth century.
+
+Nineteenth century art began in France in the last years of the
+eighteenth century. It began well, for it began with its greatest
+painters--Ingres, Corot, and Delacroix. Ingres was born in 1780,
+Gericault in 1791, Corot in 1796, Delacroix in 1798, Diaz in 1809,
+Dupré in 1812, Rousseau in 1812, Jacques in 1813, Meissonier in 1815,
+Millet in 1815, Troyon in 1816, Daubigny in 1817, Courbet in 1819,
+Fromentin in 1820, Monticelli in 1824, Puvis de Chavannes in 1824,
+Cabanel in 1825, Hervier in 1827, Vollon in 1833, Manet in 1833, Degas
+in 1834. With a little indulgence the list might be considerably
+enlarged.
+
+The circumstances in which this artistic manifestation took place were
+identical with the circumstances which brought about every one of the
+great artistic epochs. It came upon France as a consequence of huge
+national aspiration, when nationhood was desired and disaster had
+joined men together in struggle, and sent them forth on reckless
+adventure. It has been said that art is decay, the pearl in the
+oyster; but such belief seems at variance with any reading of history.
+The Greek sculptors came after Salamis and Marathon; the Italian
+renaissance came when Italy was distracted with revolution and was
+divided into opposing states. Great empires have not produced great
+men. Art came upon Holland after heroic wars in which the Dutchmen
+vehemently asserted their nationhood, defending their country against
+the Spaniard, even to the point of letting in the sea upon the
+invaders. Art came upon England when England was most adventurous,
+after the victories of Marlborough. Art came upon France after the
+great revolution, after the victories of Marengo and Austerlitz, after
+the burning of Moscow. A unique moment of nationhood gave birth to a
+long list of great artists, just as similar national enthusiasm gave
+birth to groups of great artists in England, in Holland, in Florence,
+in Venice, in Athens.
+
+Having determined the century of France's artistic period we will ask
+where we shall place it amongst the artist period of the past.
+Comparison with Greece, Italy, or Venice is manifestly impossible; the
+names of Rembrandt, Hals, Ruysdael, Peter de Hoogh, Terburg, and Cuyp
+give us pause. We remember the names of Ingres, Delacroix, Corot,
+Millet, and Degas. Even the divine name of Ingres cannot save the
+balance from sinking on the side of Holland. Then we think of
+Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Wilson, and Morland, and wonder how
+they compare with the Frenchmen. The best brains were on the French
+side, they had more pictorial talent, and yet the school when taken as
+a whole is not so convincing as the English. Why, with better brains,
+and certainly more passion and desire of achievement, does the French
+school fall behind the English? Why, notwithstanding its extraordinary
+genius, does it come last in merit as it comes last in time amongst
+the world's artistic epochs? Has the nineteenth century brought any
+new intention into art which did not exist before in England, Holland,
+or Italy? Yes, the nineteenth century has brought a new intention into
+art, and I think that it is this very new intention that has caused
+the failure of the nineteenth century. To explain myself, I will have
+to go back to first principles.
+
+In the beginning the beauty of man was the artist's single theme.
+Science had not then relegated man to his exact place in creation: he
+reigned triumphant, Nature appearing, if at all, only as a kind of
+aureole. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman artists saw nothing,
+and cared for nothing, except man; the representation of his beauty,
+his power, and his grandeur was their whole desire, whether they
+carved or painted their intention, and I may say the result was the
+same. The painting of Apelles could not have differed from the
+sculpture of Phidias; painting was not then separated from her elder
+sister. In the early ages there was but one art; even in Michael
+Angelo's time the difference between painting and sculpture was so
+slight as to be hardly worth considering. Is it possible to regard the
+"Last Judgment" as anything else but a coloured bas-relief, more
+complete and less perfect than the Greeks? Michael Angelo's artistic
+outlook was the same as Phidias'. One chose the "Last Judgment" and
+the other "Olympus", but both subjects were looked at from the same
+point of view. In each instance the question asked was--what
+opportunity do they afford for the display of marvellous human form?
+And when Michael Angelo carved the "Moses" and painted the "St.
+Jerome" he was as deaf and blind as any Greek to all other
+consideration save the opulence and the magic of drapery, the
+vehemence and the splendour of muscle. Nearly two thousand years had
+gone by and the artistic outlook had not changed at all; three hundred
+years have passed since Michael Angelo, and inthose three hundred
+years what revolution has not been effected? How different our
+estheticism, our aims, our objects, our desires, our aspiration, and
+how different our art!
+
+After Michael Angelo painting and sculpture became separate arts:
+sculpture declined, and colour filled the whole artistic horizon. But
+this change was the only change; the necessities of the new medium had
+to be considered; but the Italian and Venetian painters continued to
+view life and art from the same side. Michael Angelo chose his
+subjects merely because of the opportunities they offered for the
+delineation of form, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese chose theirs
+merely for the opportunities they offered for the display of colour. A
+new medium of expression had been discovered, that was all. The themes
+of their pictures were taken from the Bible, if you will, but the
+scenes they represented with so much pomp of colour were seen by them
+through the mystery of legend, and the vision was again sublimated by
+naive belief and primitive aspiration.
+
+The stories of the Old and New Testaments were not anecdotes; faith
+and ignorance had raised them above the anecdote, and they had become
+epics, whether by intensity of religious belief--as in the case of the
+monk of Fiesole--or by being given sublime artistic form--for paganism
+was not yet dead in the world to witness Leonardo, Raphael, and Andrea
+del Sarto. To these painters Biblical subjects were a mere pretext for
+representing man in all his attributes; and when the same subjects
+were treated by the Venetians, they were transformed in a pomp of
+colour, and by an absence of all _true_ colour and by contempt for
+history and chronology became epical and fantastical. It is only
+necessary to examine any one of the works of the great Venetians to
+see that they bestowed hardly a thought on the subject of their
+pictures. When Titian painted the "Entombment of Christ", what did he
+see? A contrast--a white body, livid and dead, carried by
+full-blooded, red-haired Italians, who wept, and whose sorrow only
+served to make them more beautiful. That is how he understood a
+subject. The desire to be truthful was not very great, nor was the
+desire to be new much more marked; to be beautiful was the first and
+last letter of a creed of which we know very little to-day.
+
+Art died in Italy, and the subject had not yet appeared; and at the
+end of the sixteenth century the first painters of the great Dutch
+school were born, and before 1650 a new school, entirely original,
+having nothing in common with anything that had gone before, had
+formulated its aestheticism and produced masterpieces. In these
+masterpieces we find no suspicion of anything that might be called a
+subject; the absence of subject is even more conspicuous in the
+Dutchmen than in the Italians. In the Italian painters the subject
+passed unperceived in a pomp of colour or a Pagan apotheosis of
+humanity; in the Dutchmen it is dispensed with altogether. No longer
+do we read of miracles or martyrdoms, but of the most ordinary
+incidents of everyday life. Turning over the first catalogue to hand
+of Dutch pictures, I read: "View of a Plain, with shepherd, cows, and
+sheep in the foreground"; "The White Horse in the Riding School"; "A
+Lady Playing the Virginal"; "Peasants Drinking Outside a Tavern";
+"Peasants Drinking in a Tavern"; "Peasants Gambling Outside a Tavern";
+"Brick-making in a Landscape"; "The Wind-mill"; "The Water-mill";
+"Peasants Bringing Home the Hay". And so on, and so on. If we meet
+with a military skirmish, we are not told where the skirmish took
+place, nor what troops took part in the skirmish. "A Skirmish in a
+Rocky Pass" is all the information that is vouchsafed to us. Italian
+art is invention from end to end, in Dutch art no slightest trace of
+invention is to be found; one art is purely imaginative, the other is
+plainly realistic; and yet, at an essential point, the two arts
+coincide; in neither does the subject prevail; and if Dutch art is
+more truthful than Italian art, it is because they were unimaginative,
+stay-at-home folk, whose feet did not burn for foreign travel, and
+whose only resource was, therefore, to reproduce the life around them,
+and into that no element of curiosity could come. For their whole
+country was known to them; even when they left their native town they
+still continued to paint what they had seen since they were little
+children.
+
+And, like Italian, Dutch art died before the subject had appeared. It
+was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject
+really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or
+phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay. I think
+Greuze was the first to conceive a picture after the fashion of a
+scene in a play--I mean those domestic dramas which he invented, and
+in which the interest of the subject so clearly predominates--"The
+Prodigal Son", for instance. In this picture we have the domestic
+drama exactly as a stage manager would set it forth. The indignant
+father, rising from table, prepares to anathematise the repentant son,
+who stands on the threshold, the weeping mother begs forgiveness for
+her son, the elder girl advances shyly, the younger children play with
+their toys, and the serving-girl drops the plate of meat which she is
+bringing in. And ever since the subject has taken first place in the
+art of France, England, and Germany, and in like measure as the
+subject made itself felt, so did art decline.
+
+For the last hundred years painters seem to have lived in libraries
+rather than in studios. All literatures and all the sciences have been
+pressed into the service of painting, and an Academy catalogue is in
+itself a liberal education. In it you can read choice extracts from
+the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Goethe, from Dante. You can dip into
+Greek and Latin literature, history--ancient and modern--you can learn
+something of all mythologies-Pagan, Christian, and Hindoo; if your
+taste lies in the direction of Icelandic legends, you will not be
+disappointed in your sixpennyworth. For the last hundred years the
+painter seems to have neglected nothing except to learn how to paint.
+
+For more than a hundred years painting has been in service. She has
+acted as a sort of handmaiden to literature, her mission being to make
+clear to the casual and the unlettered what the lettered had already
+understood and enjoyed in a more subtle and more erudite form. But to
+pass from the abstract to the concrete, and, so far as regards
+subject, to make my meaning quite clear to every one, I cannot do
+better than to ask my readers to recall Mr. Luke Fildes' picture of
+"The Doctor". No better example could be selected of a picture in
+which the subject is the supreme interest. True that Mr. Fildes has
+not taken his subject from novel or poem; in this picture he may have
+been said to have been his own librettist, and perhaps for that very
+reason the subject is the one preponderating interest in the picture.
+He who doubts if this be so has only to ask himself if any critic
+thought of pointing to any special passage of colour in this picture,
+of calling attention to the quality of the modelling or the ability of
+the drawing. No; what attracted attention was the story. Would the
+child live or die? Did that dear, good doctor entertain any hopes of
+the poor little thing's recovery? And the poor parents, how grieved
+they seemed! Perhaps it is their only child. The picture is typical of
+contemporary art, which is nearly all conceived in the same spirit,
+and can therefore have no enduring value. And if by chance the English
+artist does occasionally escape from the vice of subject for subject's
+sake, he almost invariably slips into what I may called the derivative
+vices--exactness of costume, truth of effect and local colour. To
+explain myself on this point, I will ask the reader to recall any one
+of Mr. Alma Tadema's pictures; it matters not a jot which is chosen.
+That one, for instance, where, in a circular recess of white marble,
+Sappho reads to a Greek poet, or is it the young man who is reading to
+Sappho and her maidens? The interest of the picture is purely
+archaeological. According to the very latest researches, the ornament
+which Greek women wore in their hair was of such a shape, and Mr.
+Tadema has reproduced the shape in his picture. Further researches are
+made, and it is discovered that that ornament was not worn until a
+hundred years later. The picture is therefore deprived of some of its
+interest, and the researches of the next ten years may make it appear
+as old-fashioned as the Greek pictures of the last two generations
+appear in our eyes to-day. Until then it is as interesting as a page
+of Smith's _Classical Dictionary_. We look at it and we say, "How
+curious! And that was how the Greeks washed and dressed themselves!"
+
+When Mr. Holman Hunt conceived the idea of a picture of Christ earning
+His livelihood by the sweat of His brow, it seemed to him to be quite
+necessary to go to Jerusalem. There he copied a carpenter's shop from
+nature, and he filled it with Arab tools and implements, feeling sure
+that, the manners and customs having changed but little in the East,
+it was to be surmised that such tools and implements must be nearly
+identical with those used eighteen centuries ago. To dress the Virgin
+in sumptuous flowing robes, as Raphael did, was clearly incorrect; the
+Virgin was a poor woman, and could not have worn more than a single
+garment, and the garment she wore probably resembled the dress of the
+Arab women of the present day, and so on and so on. Through the window
+we see the very landscape that Christ looked upon. From the point of
+view of the art critic of the _Daily Telegraph_ nothing could be
+better; the various sites and prospects are explained and commented
+upon, and the heart of middle-class England beats in sympathetic
+response. But the real picture-lover sees nothing save two
+geometrically drawn figures placed in the canvas like diagrams in a
+book of Euclid. And the picture being barren of artistic interest, his
+attention is caught by the Virgin's costume, and the catalogue informs
+him that Mr. Hunt's model was an Arab woman in Jerusalem, whose dress
+in all probability resembled the dress the Virgin wore two thousand
+years ago. The carpenter's shop he is assured is most probably an
+exact counterpart of the carpenter's shop in which Christ worked. How
+very curious! how very curious!
+
+Curiosity in art has always been a corruptive influence, and the art
+of our century is literally putrid with curiosity. Perhaps the desire
+of home was never so fixed and so real in any race as some would have
+us believe. At all times there have been men whose feet itched for
+travel; even in Holland, the country above all others which gave
+currency to the belief in the stay-at-home instinct, there were always
+adventurous spirits who yearned for strange skies and lands. It was
+this desire of travel that destroyed the art of Holland in the
+seventeenth century. I can hardly imagine an article that would be
+more instructive and valuable than one dealing precisely with those
+Dutchmen who went to Italy in quest of romance, poetry, and general
+artistic culture, for travel has often had an injurious effect on art.
+I do not say foreign travel, I say any travel. The length of the
+journey counts for nothing, once the painter's inspiration springs
+from the novelty of the colour, or the character of the landscape, or
+the interest that a strange costume suggests. There are painters who
+have never been further than Maidenhead, and who bring back what I
+should call _notes de voyage_; there are others who have travelled
+round the world and have produced general aspects bearing neither
+stamp nor certificate of mileage--in other words, pictures. There are,
+therefore, two men who must not be confused one with the other, the
+traveller that paints and the painter that travels.
+
+Every day we hear of a painter who has been to Norway, or to Brittany,
+or to Wales, or to Algeria, and has come back with sixty-five
+sketches, which are now on view, let us say, at Messrs. Dowdeswell's
+Galleries, in New Bond Street, the home of all such exhibitions. The
+painter has been impressed by the savagery of fiords, by the
+prettiness of blouses and sabots, by the blue mountain in the distance
+and the purple mountain in the foreground, by the narrow shade of the
+street, and the solemnity of a _burnous_ or the grace of a _haik_
+floating in the wind. The painter brings back these sights and scenes
+as a child brings back shells from the shore--they seemed very strange
+and curious, and, therefore, like the child, he brought back, not the
+things themselves, but the next best things, the most faithful
+sketches he could make of them. To understand how impossible it is to
+paint _pictures_ in a foreign country, we have only to imagine a young
+English painter setting up his easel in, let us say, Algeria. There he
+finds himself confrontedwith a new world; everything is different: the
+costumes are strange, the rhythm of the lines is different, the
+effects are harsh and unknown to him; at home the earth is dark and
+the sky is light, in Algeria the everlasting blue must be darker than
+the white earth, and the key of colour widely different from anything
+he has seen before. Selection is impossible, he cannot distinguish
+between the important and the unimportant; everything strikes him with
+equal vividness. To change anything of this country, so clear, so
+precise, so characteristic, is to soften; to alleviate what is too
+rude, is to weaken; to generalise, is to disfigure. So the artist is
+obliged to take Algiers in the lump; in spite of himself he will find
+himself forced into a scrupulous exactitude, nothing must be passed
+over, and so his pictures are at best only the truth, photographic
+truth and the naturalness of a fac-simile.
+
+The sixty-five drawings which the painter will bring back and will
+exhibit in Messrs. Dowdeswell's will be documentary evidence of the
+existence of Algeria--of all that makes a country itself, of exactly
+the things by which those who have been there know it, of the things
+which will make it known to those who have not been there, the exact
+type of the inhabitants, their costume, their attitudes, their ways,
+and manner of living. Once the painter accepts truth for aim and end,
+it becomes impossible to set a limit upon his investigations. We shall
+learn how this people dress, ride, and hunt; we shall learn what arms
+they use--the painter will describe them as well as a pencil may
+describe--the harness of the horses he must know and understand;
+through dealing with so much novelty it becomes obligatory for the
+travelling painter to become explanatory and categorical. And as the
+attraction of the unknown corresponds in most people to the immoral
+instinct of curiosity, the painter will find himself forced to attempt
+to do with paint and canvas what he could do much better in a written
+account. His public will demand pictures composed after the manner of
+an inventory, and the taste for ethnography will end by being confused
+with the sentiment of beauty.
+
+Amongst this collection of _documents_ which causes the Gallery to
+resound with foolish and vapid chatter there are two small pictures.
+Every one has passed by them, but now an artist is examining them, and
+they are evidently the only two things in the exhibition that interest
+him. One is entitled "Sunset on the Nile", an impression of the
+melancholy of evening; the other is entitled "Pilgrims", a band of
+travellers passing up a sandy tract, an impression of hot desert
+solitudes.
+
+And now I will conclude with an anecdote taken from one to whom I owe
+much. Two painters were painting on the banks of the Seine. Suddenly a
+shepherd passed driving before him a long flock of sheep, silhouetting
+with supple movement upon the water whitening under a grey sky at the
+end of April. The shepherd had his scrip on his back, he wore the
+great felt hat and the gaiters of the herdsman, two black dogs,
+picturesque in form, trotted at his heels, for the flock was going in
+excellent order. "Do you know," cried one painter to the other, "that
+nothing is more interesting to paint than a shepherd on the banks of
+_a river_?" He did not say the Seine--he said a river.
+
+
+
+
+ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND.
+
+
+Is the introduction of the subject into art the one and only cause for
+the defeat of the brilliant genius which the Revolution and the
+victories of Napoleoncalled into existence? Are there not other modern
+and special signs which distinguish the nineteenth century French
+schools from all the schools that preceded it? I think there are.
+
+Throwing ourselves back in our chairs, let us think of this French
+school in its _ensemble_. What extraordinary variety! What an absence
+of fixed principle! curiosity, fever, impatience, hurry, anxiety,
+desire touching on hysteria. An enormous expenditure of force, but
+spent in so many different and contrary directions, that the sum-total
+of the result seems a little less than we had expected. Throwing
+ourselves back in our chairs, and closing our eyes a second time, let
+us think of our eighteenth century English school. Is it not like
+passing from the glare and vicarious holloaing of the street into a
+quiet, grave assembly of well-bred men, who are not afraid to let each
+other speak, and know how to make themselves heard without shouting;
+men who choose their words so well that they afford to speak without
+emphasis, and in whose speech you find neither neologisms, nor
+inversions, nor grammatical extravagances, nor calculated brutalities,
+nor affected ignorance, nor any faintest trace of pedantry? What these
+men have to say is more or less interesting, but they address us in
+the same language, and however arbitrarily we may place them, though
+we hang a pig-stye by Morland next to a duchess by Gainsborough, we
+are surprised by a pleasant air of family likeness in the execution.
+We feel, however differently these men see and think, that they are
+content to express themselves in the same language. Their work may be
+compared to various pieces of music played on an instrument which was
+common property; they were satisfied with the instrument, and
+preferred to compose new music for it than to experiment with the
+instrument itself.
+
+It may be argued that in the lapse of a hundred years the numerous
+differences of method which characterise modern painting will
+disappear, and that it will seem as uniform to the eyes of the
+twenty-first century as the painting of the eighteenth century seems
+in our eyes to-day. I do not think this will be so. And in proof of
+this opinion I will refer again to the differences of opinion
+regarding the first principles of painting and drawing which divided
+Ingres and Géricault. Differences regarding first principles never
+existed between the leaders of any other artistic movement. Not
+between Michael Angelo and Raphael, not between Veronese, Tintoretto,
+Titian, and Rubens; not between Hals or any other Dutchman, except
+Rembrandt, born between 1600 and 1640; or between Van Dyck and
+Reynolds and Gainsborough. Nor must the difference between the methods
+of Giotto and Titian cause any one to misunderstand my meaning. The
+change that two centuries brought into art was a gradual change,
+corresponding exactly to the ideas which the painter wished to
+express; each method was sufficient to explain the ideas current at
+the time it was invented for that purpose; it served that purpose and
+no more.
+
+Facilities for foreign travel, international exhibitions, and
+cosmopolitanism have helped to keep artists of all countries in a
+ferment of uncertainty regarding even the first principles of their
+art. But this is not all; education has proved a vigorous and rapid
+solvent, and has completed the disintegration of art. A young man goes
+to the Beaux Arts; he is taught how to measure the model with his
+pencil, and how to determine the movement of the model with his
+plumb-line. He is taught how to draw by the masses rather than by the
+character, and the advantages of this teaching permit him, if he is an
+intelligent fellow, to produce at the end of two years' hard labour a
+measured, angular, constipated drawing, a sort of inferior photograph.
+He is then set to painting, and the instruction he receives amounts to
+this--that he must not rub the paint about with his brush as he rubbed
+the chalk with his paper stump. After a long methodical study of the
+model, an attempt is made to prepare a corresponding tone; no medium
+must be used; and when the, large square brush is filled full of
+sticky, clogging pigment it is drawn half an inch down and then half
+an inch across the canvas, and the painter must calculate how much he
+can finish at a sitting, for this system does not admit of
+retouchings. It is practised in all the French studios, where it is
+known as _la peinture au premier coup_.
+
+A clever young man, a man of talent, labours at art in the manner I
+have described from eight to ten hours a day, and at the end of six or
+seven years his education is completed. During the long while of his
+pupilage he has heard, "first learn your trade, and then do what you
+like". The time has arrived for him to do what he likes. He already
+suspects that the mere imitation of MM. Bouguereau and Lefebvre will
+bring him neither fame nor money; he soon finds that is so, and it
+becomes clear to him he must do something different. Enticing vistas
+of possibilities open out before him, but he is like a man whose limbs
+have been kept too long in splints--they are frozen; and he at length
+understands the old and terrible truth: as the twig is bent so will it
+grow. The skin he would slough will not be sloughed; he tries all the
+methods--robust executions, lymphatic executions, sentimental and
+insipid executions, painstaking executions, cursive and impertinent
+executions. Through all these the Beaux Arts student, if he is
+intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his
+primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without
+ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he
+is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries.
+Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects
+learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of
+ignorance, equally unreal--a mild, sophisticated ignorance, which he
+calls _naïveté_. And these various execution she is never more than
+superficially acquainted with; he does not practise any one long
+enough to extract what good there may be in it.
+
+To set before the reader the full story of the French decadence, I
+should have to relate the story of the great schism of some few years
+ago, when the pedants remained at the _Salon_ under the headship of
+Mr. Bouguereau, and the experimentalists followed Meissonier to the
+Champs de Mars.[Footnote: See "Impressions and Opinions."]The
+authoritative name of Meissonier, the genius of Puvis de Chavannes,
+and the interest of the exhibition of Stevens' early work, sufficed
+for some years to disguise the progress and the tendency of the
+declension of French art; and it was not until last year (1892) that
+it was impossible to doubt any longer that the great French
+renaissance of the beginning of the century had worn itself out, that
+the last leaves were falling, and that probably a long period of
+winter rest was preparing. French art has resolved itself into pedants
+and experimentalists! The _Salon_ is now like to a library of Latin
+verses composed by the Eton and Harrow masters and their pupils; the
+Champs de Mars like a costume ball at Elyseé Montmartre.
+
+In England it is customary for art to enter by a side door, and the
+enormous subvention to the Kensington Schools would never have been
+voted by Parliament if the bill had not been gilt with the usual
+utility gilding. It was represented that the schools were intended for
+something much more serious than the mere painting of pictures, which
+only rich people could buy: the schools were primarily intended as
+schools of design, wherein the sons and daughters of the people would
+be taught how to design wall-papers, patterns for lace, curtains,
+damask table-cloths, etc. The intention, like many another, was
+excellent; but the fact remains that, except for examination purposes,
+the work done by Kensington students is useless. A design for a piece
+of wall-paper, for which a Kensington student is awarded a medal, is
+almost sure to prove abortive when put to a practical test. The
+isolated pattern looks pretty enough on the two feet of white paper on
+which it is drawn; but when the pattern is manifolded, it is usually
+found that the designer has not taken into account the effect of the
+repetition. That is the pitfall into which the Kensington student
+usually falls; he cannot make practical application of his knowledge,
+and at Minton's factory all the designs drawn by Kensington students
+have to be redrawn by those who understand the practical working out
+of the processes of reproduction and the quality of the material
+employed. So complete is the failure of the Kensington student, that
+to plead a Kensington education is considered to be an almost fatal
+objection against any one applying for work in any of our industrial
+centres.
+
+Five-and-twenty years ago the schools of art at South Kensington were
+the most comical in the world; they were the most complete parody on
+the Continental school of art possible to imagine. They are no doubt
+the same to-day as they were five-and-twenty years ago--any way, the
+educational result is the same. The schools as I remember them were
+faultless in everything except the instruction dispensed there. There
+were noble staircases, the floors were covered with cocoa-nut matting,
+the rooms admirably heated with hot-water pipes, there were plaster
+casts and officials. In the first room the students practised drawing
+from the flat. Engraved outlines of elaborate ornamentation were given
+them, and these they drew with lead pencil, measuring the spaces
+carefully with compasses. In about six months or a year the student
+had learned to use his compass correctly, and to produce a fine hard
+black-lead outline; the harder and finer the outline, the more the
+drawing looked like a problem in a book of Euclid, the better the
+examiner was pleased, and the more willing was he to send the student
+to the room upstairs, where drawing was practised from the antique.
+
+This was the room in which the wisdom of South Kensington attained a
+complete efflorescence. I shall never forget the scenes I witnessed
+there. Having made choice of a cast, the student proceeded to measure
+the number of heads; he then measured the cast in every direction, and
+ascertained by means of a plumb-line exactly where the lines fell. It
+wasmore like land-surveying than drawing, and to accomplish this
+portion of his task took generally a fortnight, working six hours a
+week. He then placed a sheet of tissue paper upon his drawing, leaving
+only one small part uncovered, and, having reduced his chalk pencil to
+the finest possible point, he proceeded to lay in a set of extremely
+fine lines. These were crossed by a second set of lines, and the two
+sets of lines were elaborately stippled, every black spot being
+carefully picked out with bread. With a patience truly sublime in its
+folly, he continued the process all the way down the figure,
+accomplishing, if he were truly industrious, about an inch square in
+the course of an evening. Our admiration was generally directed to
+those who had spent the longest time on their drawings. After three
+months' work a student began to be noticed; at the end of four he
+became an important personage. I remember one who had contrived to
+spend six months on his drawing. He was a sort of demigod, and we used
+to watch him anxious and alarmed lest he might not have the genius to
+devote still another month to it, and our enthusiasm knew no bounds
+when we learned that, a week before the drawings had to be sent in, he
+had taken his drawing home and spent three whole days stippling it and
+picking out the black spots with bread.
+
+The poor drawing had neither character nor consistency; it looked like
+nothing under the sun, except a drawing done at Kensington--a flat,
+foolish thing, but very soft and smooth. But this was enough; it was
+passed by the examiners, and the student went into the Life Room to
+copy an Italian model as he had copied the Apollo Belvedere. Once or
+twice a week a gentleman who painted tenth-rate pictures, which were
+not always hung in the Academy, came round and passed casual remarks
+on the quality of the stippling. There was a head-master who painted
+tenth-rate historical pictures, after the manner of a tenth-rate
+German painter in a provincial town, in a vast studio upstairs, which
+the State was good enough to provide him with, and he occasionally
+walked through the studios; on an average, I should say, once a month.
+
+The desire to organise art proceeded in France from a love of system,
+and in England from a love of respectability. To the ordinary mind
+there is something especially reassuring in medals, crowns,
+examinations, professors, and titles; and since the founding of the
+Kensington Schools we unfortunately hear no more of parents opposing
+their children's wishes to become artists. The result of all these
+facilities for art study has been to swamp natural genius and to
+produce enormous quantities of vacuous little water colours and slimy
+little oil colours. Young men have been prevented from going to
+Australia and Canada and becoming rough farmers, and young ladies from
+following them and becoming rough wives and themothers of healthy
+children. Instead of such natural emigration and extension of the
+race, febrile little pilgrimages have been organised to Paris and
+Grey, whence astonishing methods and theories regarding the
+conditions, under which painting alone can be accomplished, have been
+brought back. Original Kensington stipple has been crossed with square
+brush-work, and the mule has been bred in and in with open brush-work,
+and fresh strains have been sought in the execution at the angle of
+forty-five; art has become infinitely hybrid and definitely sterile.
+
+Must we then conclude that all education is an evil? Why exaggerate;
+why outstrip the plain telling of the facts? For those who are
+thinking of adopting art as a profession it is sufficient to know that
+the one irreparable evil is a bad primary education. Be sure that
+after five years of the Beaux Arts you cannot become a great painter.
+Be sure that after five years of Kensington you can never become a
+painter at all. "If not at Kensington nor at the Beaux Arts, where am
+I to obtain the education I stand in need of?" cries the embarrassed
+student. I do not propose to answer that question directly. How the
+masters of Holland and Flanders obtained their marvellous education is
+not known. We neither know how they learned nor how they painted. Did
+the early masters paint first in monochrome, adding the colouring
+matter afterwards? Much vain conjecturing has been expended in
+attempting to solve this question. Did Ruysdale paint direct from
+nature or from drawings? Unfortunately on this question history has no
+single word to say. We know that Potter learned his trade in the
+fields in lonely communication with nature. We know too that Crome was
+a house-painter, and practised painting from nature when his daily
+work was done. Nevertheless he attained as perfect a technique as any
+painter that ever lived. Morland, too, was self-taught: he practised
+painting in the fields and farmyards and the country inns where he
+lived, oftentimes paying for board and lodging with a picture. Did his
+art suffer from want of education? Is there any one who believes that
+Morland would have done better work if he had spent three or four
+years stippling drawings from the antique at South Kensington?
+
+I will conclude these remarks, far too cursive and incomplete, with an
+anecdote which, I think, will cause the thoughtful to ponder. Some
+seven or eight years ago, Renoir, a painter of rare talent and
+originality, after twenty years of struggle with himself and poverty,
+succeeded in attaining a very distinct and personal expression of his
+individuality. Out of a hundred influences he had succeeded in
+extracting an art as beautiful as it was new. His work was beginning
+to attract buyers. For the first time in his life he had a little
+money in hand, and he thought he would like a holiday. Long reading of
+novels leads the reader to suppose that he found his ruin in a period
+of riotous living, the reaction induced by anxiety and over-work. Not
+at all. He did what every wise friend would have advised him to do
+under the circumstances: he went to Venice to study Tintoretto. The
+magnificences of this master struck him through with the sense of his
+own insignificance; he became aware of the fact that he could not draw
+like Tintoretto; and when he returned to Paris he resolved to subject
+himself to two years of hard study in an art school. For two years he
+laboured in the life class, working on an average from seven to ten
+hours a day, and in two years he had utterly destroyed every trace of
+the charming and delightful art which had taken him twenty years to
+build up. I know of no more tragic story--do you?
+
+
+
+
+INGRES AND COROT.
+
+
+Of the thirty or more great artists who made the artistic movement at
+the beginning of the century in France, five will, I think, exercise a
+prolonged influence on the art of the future--Ingres, Corot, Millet,
+Manet, and Degas.
+
+The omission of the name of Delacroix will surprise many; but though
+Delacroix will engage the attention of artists as they walk through
+the Louvre, I do not think that they will turn to him for counsel in
+their difficulty, or that they will learn from him any secrets of
+their craft. In the great masters of pictorial composition--Michael
+Angelo, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens--the passion and tumult of
+the work resides solely in the conception; the execution is always
+calculated, and the result is perfectly predetermined and accurately
+foreseen. To explain myself I will tell an anecdote which is always
+told whenever Delacroix's name is mentioned, without, however, the
+true significance of the anecdote being perceived. After seeing
+Constable's pictures, Delacroix repainted one of his most important
+works from end to end.
+
+Of Degas [Footnote: See essay on Degas In "Impressions and Opinions".]
+and Manet I have spoken elsewhere. Millet seems to me to be a sort of
+nineteenth century Greuze. The subject-matter is different, but at
+bottom the art of these two painters is more alike than is generally
+supposed. Neither was a painter in any true sense of the word, and if
+the future learns anything from Millet, it will be how to separate the
+scene from the environment which absorbs it, how to sacrifice the
+background, how to suggest rather than to point out, and how by a
+series of ellipses to lead the spectator to imagine what is not there.
+The student may learn from Millet that it was by sometimes servilely
+copying nature, sometimes by neglecting nature, that the old masters
+succeeded in conveying not an illusion but an impression of life.
+
+But of all nineteenth century painters Ingres and Corot seem most sure
+of future life; their claim upon the attention and the admiration of
+future artists seems the most securely founded. Looked at from a
+certain side Ingres seems for sheer perfection to challenge antiquity.
+Of Michael Angelo there can never be any question; he stands alone in
+a solitude of greatness. Phidias himself is not so much alone. For the
+art of Apelles could not have differed from that of Phidias; and the
+intention of many a drawing by Apelles must have been identical with
+that of "La Source". It is difficult to imagine what further beauty he
+may have introduced into a face, or what further word he might have
+had to say on the beauty of a virgin body.
+
+The legs alone suggest the possibility of censure. Ingres repainted
+the legs when the picture was finished and the model was not before
+him, so the idea obtains among artists that the legs are what are
+least perfect in the picture. In repainting the legs his object was
+omission of detail with a view to concentration of attention on the
+upper part of the figure. It must not however be supposed that the
+legs are what is known among painters as empty; they have been
+simplified; their synthetic expression has been found; and if the
+teaching at the Beaux Arts forbids the present generation to
+understand such drawing, the fault lies with the state that permits
+the Beaux Arts, and not with Ingres, whose genius was not crushed by
+it. The suggestion that Ingres spoilt the legs of "La Source" by
+repainting them when the model was not before him could come from
+nowhere but the Beaux Arts.
+
+That Ingres was not so great an artist as Raphael I am aware. That
+Ingres' drawings show none of the dramatic inventiveness of Raphael's
+drawings is so obvious that I must apologise for such a commonplace.
+Raphael's drawings were done with a different intention from Ingres';
+Raphael's drawings were no more than rough memoranda, and in no
+instance did he attempt to carry a drawing to the extreme limit that
+Ingres did. Ingres' drawing is one thing, Raphael's is another; still
+I would ask if any one thinks that Raphael could have carried a
+drawing as far as Ingres? I would ask if any of Raphael's drawings are
+as beautiful, as perfect, or as instructive as Ingres'. Take, for
+example, the pencil drawing in the Louvre, the study for the
+odalisque: who except a Greek could have produced so perfect a
+drawing? I can imagine Apelles doing something like it, but no one
+else.
+
+When you go to the Louvre examine that line of back, return the next
+day and the next, and consider its infinite perfection before you
+conclude that my appreciation is exaggerated. Think of the learning
+and the love that were necessary for the accomplishment of such
+exquisite simplifications. Never did pencil follow an outline with
+such penetrating and unwearying passion, or clasp and enfold it with
+such simple and sufficient modelling. Nowhere can you detect a
+starting-point or a measurement taken; it seems to have grown as a
+beautiful tendril grows, and every curve sways as mysteriously, and
+the perfection seems as divine. Beside it Dürer would seem crabbed and
+puzzle-headed; Holbein would seem angular and geometrical; Da Vinci
+would seem vague: and I hope that no critic by partial quotation will
+endeavour to prove me guilty of having said that Ingres was a greater
+artist than Da Vinci. I have not said any such thing; I have merely
+striven by aid of comparison to bring before the reader some sense of
+the miraculous beauty of one of Ingres' finest pencil drawings.
+
+Or let us choose the well-known drawing of the Italian lady sitting in
+the Louis XV. arm-chair, her long curved and jewelled hand lying in
+her lap and a coiffure of laces pinned down with a long jewelled
+hair-pin. How her head-dress of large laces decorates the paper, and
+the elaborate working out of the pattern, is it not a miracle of
+handicraft? How exquisite the black curls on the forehead, and how
+they balance the dark eyes which are the depth and centre of the
+composition! The necklace, how well the stones are heaped, how well
+they lie together! How well their weight and beauty are expressed! And
+the earrings, how enticing in their intricate workmanship. Then the
+movement of the face, how full it is of the indolent south, and the
+oval of the face is composed to harmonise and enhance the lace
+head-dress; and its outline, though full of classical simplifications,
+tells the character with Holbein-like fidelity; it falls away into a
+soft, weak chin in which resides a soft sensual lassitude. The black
+eyes are set like languid stars in the face, and the flesh rounds off
+softly, like a sky, modelled with a little shadow, part of the
+outline, and expressing its beauty. And then there are the marvels of
+the dress to consider: the perfect and spontaneous creation of the
+glitter of the long silk arms, and the muslin of the wrists, soft as
+foliage, and then the hardness of the bodice stitched with jewellery
+and set so romantically on the almost epicene bosom.
+
+It is the essentially Greek quality of perfection that brings Corot
+and Ingres together. They are perfect, as none other since the Greek
+sculptors has been perfect. Other painters have desired beauty at
+intervals as passionately as they, none save the Greeks so
+continuously; and the desire to be merely beautiful seemed, if
+possible, to absorb the art of Corot even more completely than it did
+that of Ingres. Among the numerous pictures, sketches, and drawings
+which he left you will find weakness, repetitions, even commonplace,
+but ugliness never. An ugly set of lines is not to be found in Corot;
+the rhythm may sometimes be weak, but his lines never run out of
+metre. For the rhythm of line as well as of sound the artist must seek
+in his own soul; he will never find it in the inchoate and discordant
+jumble which we call nature.
+
+And, after all, what is art but rhythm? Corot knew that art is nature
+made rhythmical, and so he was never known to take out a six-foot
+canvas to copy nature on. Being an artist, he preferred to observe
+nature, and he lay down and dreamed his fields and trees, and he
+walked about in his landscape, selecting his point of view,
+determining the rhythm of his lines. That sense of rhythm which I have
+defined as art was remarkable in him even from his first pictures. In
+the "Castle of St. Angelo, Rome", for instance, the placing of the
+buildings, one low down, the other high up in the picture, the bridge
+between, and behind the bridge the dome of St. Peter's, is as
+faultless a composition as his maturest work. As faultless, and yet
+not so exquisite. For it took many long and pensive years to attain
+the more subtle and delicate rhythms of "The Lake" in the collection
+of J. S. Forbes, Esq., or the landscape in the collection of G. N.
+Stevens, Esq., or the "Ravine" in the collection of Sir John Day.
+
+Corot's style changed; but it changed gradually, as nature changes,
+waxing like the moon from a thin, pure crescent to a full circle of
+light. Guided by a perfect instinct, he progressed, fulfilling the
+course of his artistic destiny. We notice change, but each change
+brings fuller beauty. And through the long and beautiful year of
+Corot's genius--full as the year itself of months and seasons--we
+notice that the change that comes over his art is always in the
+direction of purer and more spiritual beauty. We find him more and
+more absorbed in the emotion that the landscape conveys, more willing
+to sacrifice the superfluous and circumstantial for the sake of the
+immortal beauty of things.
+
+Look at the "Lac de Garde" and say if you can that the old Greek
+melody is not audible in the line which bends and floats to the lake's
+edge, in the massing and the placing of those trees, in the fragile
+grace of the broken birch which sweeps the "pale complexioned sky".
+Are we not looking into the heart of nature, and do we not hear the
+silence that is the soul of evening? In this, his perfect period, he
+is content to leave his foreground rubbed over with some expressive
+grey, knowing well that the eye rests not there, and upon his middle
+distance he will lavish his entire art, concentrating his picture on
+some one thing in which for him resides the true reality of the place;
+be this the evening ripples on the lake or the shimmering of the
+willow leaves as the last light dies out of the sky.
+
+I only saw Corot once. It was in some woods near Paris, where I had
+gone to paint, and I came across the old gentleman unexpectedly,
+seated in front of his easel in a pleasant glade. After admiring his
+work I ventured to say: "Master, what you are doing is lovely, but I
+cannot find your composition in the landscape before us." He said: "My
+foreground is a long way ahead," and sure enough, nearly two hundred
+yards away, his picture rose out of the dimness of the dell,
+stretching a little beyond the vista into the meadow.
+
+The anecdote seems to me to be a real lesson in the art of painting,
+for it shows us the painter in his very employment of nature, and we
+divine easily the transposition in the tones and in the aspect of
+things that he was engaged in bringing into that picture. And to speak
+of transpositions leads us inevitably into consideration of the great
+secret of Corot's art, his employment of what is known in studios as
+values.
+
+By values is meant the amount of light and shadow contained in a tone.
+The relation of a half-tint to the highest light, which is represented
+by the white paper, the relation of a shadow to the deepest black,
+which is represented by the chalk pencil, is easy enough to perceive
+in a drawing; but when the work is in colour the values, although not
+less real, are more difficult to estimate. For a colour can be
+considered from two points of view: either as so much colouring
+matter, or as so much light and shade. Violet, for instance, contains
+not only red and blue in proportions which may be indefinitely varied,
+but also certain proportions of light and shade; the former tending
+towards the highest light, represented on the palette by flake white;
+the latter tending towards the deepest dark, represented on the
+palette by ivory black.
+
+Similar to a note in music, no colour can be said to be in itself
+either false or true, ugly or beautiful. A note and a colour acquire
+beauty and ugliness according to their associations; therefore to
+colour well depends, in the first instance, on the painter's knowledge
+and intimate sense of the laws of contrast and similitude. But there
+is still another factor in the art of colouring well; for, just as the
+musician obtains richness and novelty of expression by means of a
+distribution of sound through the instruments of the orchestra, so
+does the painter obtain depth and richness through a judicious
+distribution of values. If we were to disturb the distribution of
+values in the pictures of Titian, Rubens, Veronese, their colour would
+at once seem crude, superficial, without cohesion or rarity. But some
+will aver that if the colour is right the values must be right too.
+However plausible this theory may seem, the practice of those who hold
+it amply demonstrates its untruth. It is interesting and instructive
+to notice how those who seek the colour without regard for the values
+inherent in the colouring matter never succeed in producing more than
+a certain shallow superficial brilliancy; the colour of such painters
+is never rich or profound, and although it may be beautiful, it is
+always wanting in the element of romantic charm and mystery.
+
+The colour is the melody, the values are the orchestration of the
+melody; and as the orchestration serves to enrich the melody, so do
+the values enrich the colour. And as melody may--nay, must--exist, if
+the orchestration be really beautiful, so colour must inhere wherever
+the values have been finely observed. In Rembrandt, the colour is
+brown and a white faintly tinted with bitumen; in Claude, the colour
+is blue, faintly flushed with yellow in the middle sky, and yet none
+has denied the right of these painters to be considered colourists.
+They painted with the values--that is to say, with what remains on the
+palette when abstraction has been made of the colouring matter--a
+delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with
+this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that
+the most beautiful pictures are painted. Corot, too, is a conspicuous
+example of this mode of painting. His right to stand among the world's
+colourists has never, so far as I know, been seriously contested, his
+pictures are almost void of colouring matter--a blending of grey and
+green, and yet the result is of a richly coloured evening.
+
+Corot and Rembrandt, as Dutilleux pointed out, arrived at the same
+goal by absolutely different ends. He saw clearly, although he could
+not express himself quite clearly, that, above all painters, Rembrandt
+and Corot excelled in that mode of pictorial expression known as
+values, or shall I say chiaroscuro, for in truth he who has said
+values has hinted chiaroscuro. Rembrandt told all that a golden ray
+falling through a darkened room awakens in a visionary brain; Corot
+told all that the grey light of morning and evening whispers in the
+pensive mind of the elegiac poet. The story told was widely different,
+but the manner of telling was the same: one attenuated in the light,
+the other attenuated in the shadow: both sacrificed the corners with a
+view to fixing the attention on the one spot in which the soul of the
+picture lives.
+
+All schools have not set great store on values, although all schools
+have set great store on drawing and colour. Values seem to have come
+and gone in and out of painting like a fashion. One generation hardly
+gives the matter a thought, the succeeding generation finds the whole
+charm of its art in values. It would be difficult to imagine a more
+interesting and instructive history than the history of values in
+painting. It is far from my scheme to write such a history, but I wish
+that such a history were written, for then we should see clearly how
+unwise were they who neglected the principle, and how much they lost.
+I would only call attention to how the principle came to be
+reintroduced into French art in the beginning of this century. It came
+from Holland _viâ_, England through the pictures of Turner and
+Constable. It was an Anglo-Dutch influence that roused French art,
+then slumbering in the pseudo-classicisms of the First Empire; and,
+half-awakened, French art turned its eyes to Holland for inspiration;
+and values, the foundation and corner-stone of Dutch art, became
+almost at a bound a first article of faith in the artistic creed. In
+1830 values came upon France like a religion. Rembrandt was the new
+Messiah, Holland was the Holy Land, and disciples were busy dispensing
+the propaganda in every studio.
+
+Since the bad example of Greuze, literature had wound round every
+branch of painting until painting seemed to disappear in the parasite
+like an oak under a cloud of ivy. The excess had been great--a
+reaction was inevitable--and Rembrandt, with his Biblical legends,
+furnished the necessary transition. But when a taste for painting had
+been reacquired, one after the other the Dutch painters became the
+fashion. It is almost unnecessary to point out the influence of
+Hobbema on the art of Rousseau. Corot was less affected by the
+Dutchmen, or, to speak more exactly, he assimilated more completely
+what he had learnt from them than his rival was able to do. Moreover,
+what he took from Holland came to him through Ruysdael rather than
+through Hobbema.
+
+The great morose dreamer, contemplative and grave as Wordsworth, must
+have made more direct and intimate appeal to Corot's soul than the
+charm and the gaiety of Hobbema's water-mills. Be this as it may, it
+was Holland that revived the long-forgotten science of values in the
+Barbizon painters. They sought their art in the direction of values,
+and very easily Corot took the lead as chief exponent of the new
+principle; and he succeeded in applying the principle of values to
+landscape painting as fully as Rembrandt had to figure painting.
+
+But at the moment when the new means of expression seemed most
+distinctly established and understood, it was put aside and lost sight
+of by a new generation of painters, and, curiously enough, by the men
+who had most vigorously proclaimed the beauty and perfection of the
+art which was to be henceforth, at least in practice, their mission to
+repudiate. For I take it that the art of the impressionists has
+nothing whatever in common with the art of Corot. True, that Corot's
+aim was to render his impression of his subject, no matter whether it
+was a landscape or a figure; in this aim he differed in no wise from
+Giotto and Van Eyck; but we are not considering Corot's aims but his
+means of expression, and his means of expression were the very
+opposite to those employed by Monet and the school of Monet. Not with
+half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school
+concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full
+light, with open spaces where the light is reflected back and forward,
+and nature is but a prism filled with dazzling and iridescent tints.
+
+I remember once writing about one of Monet's innumerable snow effects:
+"This picture is in his most radiant manner. A line of snow-enchanted
+architecture passes through the picture--only poor houses with a
+single square church tower, but they are beautiful as Greek temples in
+the supernatural whiteness of the great immaculate snow. Below the
+village, but not quite in the foreground, a few yellow bushes, bare
+and crippled by the frost, and around and above a marvellous glitter
+in pale blue and pale rose tints." I asked if the touch was not more
+precious than intimate; and I spoke, too, of a shallow and brilliant
+appearance. But if I had asked why the picture, notwithstanding its
+incontestable merits, was so much on the surface, why it so
+irresistibly suggested _un décor de théâtre_, why one did not enter
+into it as one does into a picture by Wilson or Corot, my criticism
+would have gone to the root of the evil. And the reason of this is
+because Monet has never known how to organise and control his values.
+The relation of a wall to the sky which he observes so finely seem as
+if deliberately contrived for the suppression of all atmosphere; and
+we miss in Monet the delicacy and the mystery which are the charm of
+Corot. The bath of air being withdrawn, a landscape becomes a mosaic,
+flat surface takes the place of round: the next step is some form or
+other of pre-Raphaelitism.
+
+
+
+
+MONET, SISLEY, PISSARO, AND THE DECADENCE.
+
+
+Nature demands that children should devour their parents, and Corot
+was hardly cold in his grave when his teaching came to be neglected
+and even denied. Values were abandoned and colour became the unique
+thought of the new school.
+
+My first acquaintance with Monet's painting was made in '75 or
+'76--the year he exhibited his first steam-engine and his celebrated
+troop of life-size turkeys gobbling the tall grass in a meadow, at the
+end of which stood, high up in the picture, a French château.
+Impressionism is a word that has lent itself to every kind of
+misinterpretation, for in its exact sense all true painting is
+penetrated with impressionism, but, to use the word in its most modern
+sense--that is to say, to signify the rapid noting of illusive
+appearance--Monet is the only painter to whom it may be reasonably
+applied. I remember very well that sunlit meadow and the long coloured
+necks of the turkeys. Truly it may be said that, for the space of one
+rapid glance, the canvas radiates; it throws its light in the face of
+the spectator as, perhaps, no canvas did before. But if the eyes are
+not immediately averted the illusion passes, and its place is taken by
+a somewhat incoherent and crude coloration. Then the merits of the
+picture strike you as having been obtained by excessive accomplishment
+in one-third of the handicraft and something like a formal
+protestation of the non-existence of the other two-thirds. Since that
+year I have seen Monets by the score, and have hardly observed any
+change or alteration in his manner of seeing or executing, or any
+development soever in his art. At the end of the season he comes up
+from the country with thirty or forty landscapes, all equally perfect,
+all painted in precisely the same way, and no one shows the slightest
+sign of hesitation, and no one suggests the unattainable, the beyond;
+one and all reveal to us a man who is always sure of his effect, and
+who is always in a hurry. Any corner of nature will do equally well
+for his purpose, nor is he disposed to change the disposition of any
+line of tree or river or hill; so long as a certain reverberation of
+colour is obtained all is well. An unceasing production, and an almost
+unvarying degree of excellence, has placed Monet at the head of the
+school; his pictures command high prices, and nothing goes now with
+the erudite American but Monet's landscapes. But does Monet merit this
+excessive patronage, and if so, what are the qualities in his work
+that make it superior to Sisley's and Pissaro's?
+
+Sisley is less decorative, less on the surface, and though he follows
+Monet in his pursuit of colour, nature is, perhaps, on account of his
+English origin, something more to him than a brilliant appearance. It
+has of course happened to Monet to set his easel before the suburban
+aspect that Sisley loves, but he has always treated it rather in the
+decorative than in the meditative spirit. He has never been touched by
+the humility of a lane's end, and the sentiment of the humble life
+that collects there has never appeared on his canvas. Yet Sisley,
+being more in sympathy with such nature, has often been able to
+produce a superior though much less pretentious picture than the
+ordinary stereotyped Monet. But if Sisley is more meditative than
+Monet, Pissaro is more meditative than either.
+
+Monet had arrived at his style before I saw anything of his work; of
+his earlier canvases I know nothing. Possibly he once painted in the
+Corot manner; it is hardly possible that he should not have done so.
+However this may be, Pissaro did not rid himself for many years of the
+influence of Corot. His earliest pictures were all composed in pensive
+greys and violets, and exhaled the weary sadnessof tilth and grange
+and scant orchard trees. The pale road winds through meagre uplands,
+and through the blown and gnarled and shiftless fruit-trees the
+saddening silhouette of the town drifts across the land. The violet
+spaces between the houses are the very saddest, and the spare furrows
+are patiently drawn, and so the execution is in harmony with and
+accentuates the unutterable monotony of the peasant's lot. The sky,
+too, is vague and empty, and out of its deathlike, creamy hollow the
+first shadows are blown into the pallid face of a void evening. The
+picture tells of the melancholy of ordinary life, of our poor
+transitory tenements, our miserable scrapings among the little mildew
+that has gathered on the surface of an insignificant planet. I will
+not attempt to explain why the grey-toned and meditative Pissaro
+should have consented to countenance--I cannot say to lead (for,
+unlike every other _chef d'école_, Pissaro imitated the disciples
+instead of the disciples imitating Pissaro)--the many fantastic
+revolutions in pictorial art which have agitated Montmartre during the
+last dozen years. The Pissaro psychology I must leave to take care of
+itself, confining myself strictly to the narrative of these
+revolutions.
+
+Authority for the broken brushwork of Monet is to be found in Manet's
+last pictures, and I remember Manet's reply when I questioned him
+about the pure violet shadows which, just before his death, he was
+beginning to introduce into his pictures. "One year one paints violet
+and people scream, and the following year every one paints a great
+deal more violet." If Manet's answer throws no light whatever on the
+new principle, it shows very clearly the direction, if not the goal,
+towards which his last style was moving. But perhaps I am speaking too
+cautiously, for surely broken brushwork and violet shadows lead only
+to one possible goal--the prismatic colours.
+
+Manet died, and this side--and this side only--of his art was taken up
+by Monet, Sisley, and Renoir. Or was it that Manet had begun to yield
+to an influence--that of Monet, Sisley, and Renoir--which was just
+beginning to make itself felt? Be this as it may, browns and blacks
+disappeared from the palettes of those who did not wish to be
+considered _l'école des beaux-arts, et en plein_. Venetian reds,
+siennas, and ochres were in process of abandonment, and the palette
+came to be composed very much in the following fashion: violet, white,
+blue, white, green, white, red, white, yellow, white, orange,
+white--the three primary and the three secondary colours, with white
+placed between each, so as to keep everything as distinct as possible,
+and avoid in the mixing all soiling of the tones. Monet, Sisley, and
+Renoir contented themselves with the abolition of all blacks and
+browns, for they were but half-hearted reformers, and it was clearly
+the duty of those who came after to rid the palette of all ochres,
+siennas, Venetian, Indian, and light reds. The only red and yellow
+that any one who was not, according to the expression of the new
+generation, _presque du Louvre_, could think of permitting on his
+palette were vermilion and cadmium. The first of this new generation
+was Seurat, Seurat begot Signac, Signac begot Anquetin, and Anquetin
+has begotten quite a galaxy of lesser lights, of whom I shall not
+speak in this article--of whom it is not probable that I shall ever
+speak.
+
+It was in an exhibition held in Rue Lafitte in '81 or '82 that the new
+method, which comprised two most radical reforms--an execution
+achieved entirely with the point of the brush and the division of the
+tones--was proclaimed. Or should I say reformation, for the execution
+by a series of dots is implicit in the theory of the division of the
+tones? How well I remember being attracted towards an end of the room,
+which was filled with a series of most singular pictures. There must
+have been at least ten pictures of yachts in full sail. They were all
+drawn in profile, they were all painted in the very clearest tints,
+white skies and white sails hardly relieved or explained with shadow,
+and executed in a series of minute touches, like mosaic. Ten pictures
+of yachts all in profile, all in full sail, all unrelieved by any
+attempt at atmospheric effect, all painted in a series of little dots!
+
+Great as was my wonderment, it was tenfold increased on discovering
+that only five of these pictures were painted by the new man, Seurat,
+whose name was unknown to me; the other five were painted by my old
+friend Pissaro. My first thought went for the printer; my second for
+some _fumisterie_ on the part of the hanging committee, the intention
+of which escaped me. The pictures were hung low, so I went down on my
+knees and examined the dotting in the pictures signed Seurat, and the
+dotting in those that were signed Pissaro. After a strict examination
+I was able to detect some differences, and I began to recognise the
+well-known touch even through this most wild and most wonderful
+transformation. Yes, owing to a long and intimate acquaintance
+with Pissaro and his work, I could distinguish between him and Seurat,
+but to the ordinary visitor their pictures were identical.
+
+Many claims are put forward, but the best founded is that of Seurat;
+and, so far as my testimony may serve his greater honour and glory, I
+do solemnly declare that I believe him to have been the original
+discoverer of the division of the tones.
+
+A tone is a combination of colours. In Nature colours are separate;
+they act and react one on the other, and so create in the eye the
+illusion of a mixture of various colours-in other words, of a tone.
+But if the human eye can perform this prodigy when looking on colour
+as evolved through the spectacle of the world, why should not the eye
+be able to perform the same prodigy when looking on colour as
+displayed over the surface of a canvas? Nature does not mix her
+colours to produce a tone; and the reason of the marked discrepancy
+existing between Nature and the Louvre is owing to the fact that
+painters have hitherto deemed it a necessity to prepare a tone on the
+palette before placing it on the canvas; whereas it is quite clear
+that the only logical and reasonable method is to first complete the
+analysis of the tone, and then to place the colours which compose the
+tone in dots over the canvas, varying the size of the dots and the
+distance between the dots according to the depth of colour desired by
+the painter.
+
+If this be done truly--that is to say, if the first analysis of the
+tones be a correct analysis--and if the spectator places himself at
+the right distance from the picture, there will happen in his eyes
+exactly the same blending of colour as happens in them when they are
+looking upon Nature. An example will, I think, make my meaning clear.
+We are in a club smoking-room. The walls are a rich ochre. Three or
+four men sit between us and the wall, and the blue smoke of their
+cigars fills the middle air. In painting this scene it would be usual
+to prepare the tone on the palette, and the preparation would be
+somewhat after this fashion: ochre warmed with a little red--a pale
+violet tinted with lake for the smoke of the cigars.
+
+But such a method of painting would seem to Seurat and Signac to be
+artless, primitive, unscientific, childish, _presque du Louvre_--above
+all, unscientific. They would say, "Decompose the tone. That tone is
+composed of yellow, white, and violet turning towards lake"; and,
+having satisfied themselves in what proportions, they would dot their
+canvases over with pure yellow and pure white, the interspaces being
+filled in with touches of lake and violet, numerous where the smoke is
+thickest, diminishing in number where the wreaths vanish into air. Or
+let us suppose that it is a blue slated roof that the dottist wishes
+to paint. He first looks behind him, to see what is the colour of the
+sky. It is an orange sky. He therefore represents the slates by means
+of blue dots intermixed with orange and white dots, and--ah! I am
+forgetting an important principle in the new method--the complementary
+colour which the eye imagines, but does not see. What is the
+complementary colour of blue, grey, and orange? Green. Therefore green
+must be introduced into the roof; otherwise the harmony would be
+incomplete, and therefore in a measure discordant.
+
+Needless to say that a sky painted in this way does not bear looking
+into. Close to the spectator it presents the appearance of a pard; but
+when he reaches the proper distance there is no denying that the
+colours do in a measure unite and assume a tone more or less
+equivalent to the tone that would have been obtained by blending the
+colours on the palette. "But," cry Seurat and Signac, "an infinitely
+purer and more beautiful tone than could have been obtained by any
+artificial blending of the colours on the palette--a tone that is the
+exact equivalent of one of Nature's tones, for it has been obtained in
+exactly the same way."
+
+Truly a subject difficult to write about in English. Perhaps it is one
+that should not be attempted anywhere except in a studio with closed
+doors. But if I did not make some attempt to explain this matter, I
+should leave my tale of the decline and fall of French art in the
+nineteenth century incomplete.
+
+Roughly speaking, these new schools--the symbolists, the decadents,
+the dividers of tones, the professors of the rhythm of gesture--date
+back about ten years. For ten years the division of the tones has been
+the subject of discussion in the aesthetic circles of Montmartre. And
+when we penetrate further into the matter--or, to be more exact, as we
+ascend into the higher regions of _La Butte_--we find the elect, who
+form so stout a phalanx against the Philistinism of the Louvre,
+themselves subdivided into numerous sections, and distraught with
+internecine feuds concerning the principle of the art which they
+pursue with all the vehemence that Veronese green and cadmium yellow
+are capable of. From ten at night till two in the morning the
+_brasseries_ of the Butte are in session. Ah! the interminable bocks
+and the reek of the cigars, until at last a hesitating exodus begins.
+An exhausted proprietor at the head of his waiters, crazed with
+sleepiness, eventually succeeds in driving these noctambulist apostles
+into the streets.
+
+Then the nervous lingering at the corner! The disputants, anxious and
+yet loth to part, say goodbye, each regretting that he had not urged
+some fresh argument--an argument which had just occurred to him, and
+which, he feels sure, would have reduced his opponent to impotent
+silence. Sometimes the partings are stormy. The question of the
+introduction of the complementary colours into the frames of the
+pictures is always a matter of strife, and results in much
+nonconformity. Several are strongly in favour of carrying the
+complementary colours into the picture-frames. "If you admit," says
+one, "that to paint a blue roof with an orange sky shining on it you
+must introduce the complementary colour green--which the spectator
+does not see, but imagines--there is excellent reason why you should
+dot the frame all over with green, for the picture and its frame are
+not two things, but one thing." "But," cries his opponent, "there is a
+finality in all things; if you carry your principle out to the bitter
+end, the walls as well as the frame should be dotted with the
+complementary colours, the staircases too, the streets likewise; and
+if we pursue the complementaries into the street, who shall say where
+we are to stop? Why stop at all, unless the neighbours protest that we
+are interfering with their complementaries?"
+
+The schools headed by Signac and Anquetin comprise numerous disciples
+and adherents. They do not exhibit in the Salon or in the Champ de
+Mars; but that is because they disdain to do so. They hold exhibitions
+of their own, and their picture-dealers trade only in their works and
+in those belonging to or legitimately connected with the new schools.
+
+If I have succeeded in explaining the principle of coloration employed
+by these painters, I must have excited some curiosity in the reader to
+see these scientifically-painted pictures. To say that they are
+strange, absurd, ridiculous, conveys no sensation of their
+extravagances; and I think that even an elaborate description would
+miss its mark. For, in truth, the pictures merit no such attention. It
+is only needful to tell the reader that they fail most conspicuously
+at the very point where it was their mission to succeed. Instead of
+excelling in brilliancy of colour the pictures painted in the ordinary
+way, they present the most complete spectacle of discoloration
+possible to imagine.
+
+Yet Signac is a man of talent, and in an exhibition of pictures which
+I visited last May I saw a wide bay, two rocky headlands extending far
+into the sea, and this offing was filled with a multitude of gull-like
+sails. There was in it a vibration of light, such an effect as a
+mosaic composed of dim-coloured but highly polished stones might
+produce. I can say no good word, however, for his portrait of a
+gentleman holding his hat in one hand and a flower in the other. This
+picture formulated a still newer aestheticism--the rhythm of gesture.
+For, according to Signac, the raising of the face and hands expresses
+joy, the depression of the face and hands denotes sadness. Therefore,
+to denote the melancholy temperament of his sitter, Signac represented
+him as being hardly able to lift his hat to his head or the flower to
+his button-hole. The figure was painted, as usual, in dots of pure
+colour lifted from the palette with the point of the brush; the
+complementary colours in duplicate bands curled up the background.
+This was considered by the disciples to be an important innovation;
+and the effect, it is needless to say, was gaudy, if not neat.
+
+A theory of Anquetin's is that wherever the painter is painting, his
+retina must still hold some sensation of the place he has left;
+therefore there is in every scene not only the scene itself, but
+remembrance of the scene that preceded it. This is not quite clear, is
+it? No. But I think I can make it clear. He who walks out of a
+brilliantly lighted saloon--that is to say, he who walks out of
+yellow--sees the other two primary colours, red and blue; in other
+words, he sees violet. Therefore Anquetin paints the street, and
+everything in it, violet--boots, trousers, hats, coats, lamp-posts,
+paving-stones, and the tail of the cat disappearing under the _porte
+cochère_.
+
+But if in my description of these schools I have conveyed the idea of
+stupidity or ignorance I have failed egregiously. These young men are
+all highly intelligent and keenly alive to art, and their doings are
+not more vain than the hundred and one artistic notions which have
+been undermining the art-sense of the French and English nations for
+the last twenty years. What I have described is not more foolish than
+the stippling at South Kensington or the drawing by the masses at
+Julien's. The theory of the division of the tones is no more foolish
+than the theory of _plein air_ or the theory of the square brushwork;
+it is as foolish, but not a jot more foolish.
+
+Great art dreams, imagines, sees, feels, expresses--reasons never. It
+is only in times of woful decadence, like the present, that the
+bleating of the schools begins to be heard; and although, to the
+ignorant, one method may seem less ridiculous than another, all
+methods--I mean, all methods that are not part and parcel of the
+pictorial intuition--are equally puerile and ridiculous. The
+separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed
+is the sure sign of decadence. France is now all decadence. In the
+Champ de Mars, as in the Salon, the man of the hour is he who has
+invented the last trick in subject or treatment.
+
+France has produced great artists in quick succession. Think of all
+the great names, beginning with Ingres and ending with Degas, and
+wonder if you can that France has at last entered on a period of
+artistic decadence. For the last sixty years the work done in literary
+and pictorial art has been immense; the soil has been worked along and
+across, in every direction; and for many a year nothing will come to
+us from France but the bleat of the scholiast.
+
+
+
+
+OUR ACADEMICIANS.
+
+
+That nearly all artists dislike and despise the Royal Academy is a
+matter of common knowledge. Whether with reason or without is a matter
+of opinion, but the existence of an immense fund of hate and contempt
+of the Academy is not denied. From Glasgow to Cornwall, wherever a
+group of artists collects, there hangs a gathering and a darkening sky
+of hate. True, the position of the Academy seems to be impregnable;
+and even if these clouds should break into storm the Academy would be
+as little affected as the rock of Gibraltar by squall or tempest. The
+Academy has successfully resisted a Royal Commission, and a crusade
+led by Mr. Holman Hunt in the columns of the _Times_ did not succeed
+in obtaining the slightest measure of reform.... Here I might consult
+Blue-books and official documents, and tell the history of the
+Academy; but for the purpose of this article the elementary facts in
+every one's possession are all that are necessary. We know that we owe
+the Academy to the artistic instincts of George III. It was he who
+sheltered it in Somerset House, and when Somerset House was turned
+into public offices, the Academy was bidden to Trafalgar Square; and
+when circumstances again compelled the authorities to ask the Academy
+to move on, the Academy, posing as a public body, demanded a site, and
+the Academy was given one worth three hundred thousand pounds. Thereon
+the Academy erected its present buildings, and when they were
+completed the Academy declared itself on the first opportunity to be
+no public body at all, but a private enterprise. Then why the site,
+and why the Royal charter? Mr. Colman, Mr. Pears, Mr. Reckitt are not
+given sites worth three hundred thousand pounds. These questions have
+often been asked, and to them the Academy has always an excellent
+answer. "The site has been granted, and we have erected buildings upon
+it worth a hundred thousand pounds; get rid of us you cannot."
+
+The position of the Academy is as impregnable as the rock of
+Gibraltar; it is as well advertised as the throne itself, and the
+income derived from the sale of the catalogues alone is enormous. Then
+the Academy has the handling of the Chantrey Bequest Funds, which it
+does not fail to turn to its own advantage by buying pictures of
+Academicians, which do not sell in the open market, at extravagant
+prices, or purchasing pictures by future Academicians, and so
+fostering, strengthening, and imposing on the public the standard of
+art which obtains in Academic circles. Such, in a few brief words, is
+the institution which controls and in a large measure directs the art
+of this country. But though I come with no project to obtain its
+dissolution, it seems to me interesting to consider the causes of the
+hatred of the Academy with which artistic England is saturated,
+oftentimes convulsed; and it may be well to ask if any institution,
+however impregnable, can continue to defy public opinion, if any
+sovereignty, however fortified by wealth and buttressed by
+prescription, can continue to ignore and outrage the opinions of its
+subjects?
+
+The hatred of artistic England for the Academy proceeds from the
+knowledge that the Academy is no true centre of art, but a mere
+commercial enterprise protected and subventioned by Government. In
+recent years every shred of disguise has been cast off, and it has
+become patent to every one that the Academy is conducted on as purely
+commercial principles as any shop in the Tottenham Court Road. For it
+is impossible to suppose that Mr. Orchardson and Mr. Watts do not know
+that Mr. Leader's landscapes are like tea-trays, that Mr. Dicksee's
+figures are like bon-bon boxes, and that Mr. Herkomer's portraits are
+like German cigars. But apparently the R.A.'s are merely concerned to
+follow the market, and they elect the men whose pictures sell best in
+the City. City men buy the productions of Mr. Herkomer, Mr. Dicksee,
+Mr. Leader, and Mr. Goodall. Little harm would be done to art if the
+money thus expended meant no more than filling stockbrokers'
+drawing-rooms with bad pictures, but the uncontrolled exercise of the
+stockbroker's taste in art means the election of a vast number of
+painters to the Academy, and election to the Academy means certain
+affixes, R.A. and A., and these signs are meant to direct opinion.
+
+For when the ordinary visitor thinks a picture very bad, and finds
+R.A. or A. after the painter's name, he concludes that he must be
+mistaken, and so a false standard of art is created in the public
+mind. But though Mr. Orchardson, Sir John Millais, Sir Frederick
+Leighton, and Mr. Watts have voted for the City merchants' nominees,
+it would be a mistake to suppose that they did not know for whom they
+should have voted. It is to be questioned if there be an R. A. now
+alive who would dare to deny that Mr. Whistler is a very great
+painter. It was easy to say he was not in the old days when, under the
+protection of Mr. Ruskin, the R.A.s went in a body and gave evidence
+against him. But now even Mr. Jones, R.A., would not venture to repeat
+the opinion he expressed about one of the most beautiful of the
+nocturnes. Time, it is true, has silenced the foolish mouth of the
+R.A., but time has not otherwise altered him; and there is as little
+chance to-day as there was twenty years ago of Mr. Whistler being
+elected an Academician.
+
+No difference exists even in Academic circles as to the merits of Mr.
+Albert Moore's work. Many Academicians will freely acknowledge that
+his non-election is a very grave scandal; they will tell you that they
+have done everything to get him elected, and have given up the task in
+despair. Mr. Whistler and Mr. Albert Moore, the two greatest artists
+living in England, will never be elected Academicians; and artistic
+England is asked to acquiesce in this grave scandal, and also in many
+minor scandals: the election of Mr. Dicksee in place of Mr. Henry
+Moore, and Mr. Stanhope Forbes in place of Mr. Swan or Mr. John
+Sargent! No one thinks Mr. Dicksee as capable an artist as Mr. Henry
+Moore, and no one thinks Mr. Stanhope Forbes as great an artist as Mr.
+Swan or Mr. Sargent. Then why were they elected? Because the men who
+represent most emphatically the taste of the City have become so
+numerous of late years in the Academy that they are able to keep out
+any one whose genius would throw a doubt on the commonplace ideal
+which they are interested in upholding. Mr. Alma Tadema would not care
+to confer such a mark of esteem as the affix R.A. on any painter
+practising an art which, when understood, would involve hatred of the
+copyplate antiquity which he supplies to the public.
+
+This explanation seems incredible, I admit, but no other explanation
+is possible, for I repeat that the Academicians do not themselves deny
+the genius of the men they have chosen to ignore. So we find the
+Academy as a body working on exactly the same lines as the individual
+R.A., whose one ambition is to extend his connection, please his
+customers, and frustrate competition; and just as the capacity of the
+individual R.A. declines when the incentive is money, so does the
+corporate body lose its strength, and its hold on the art instincts of
+the nation relaxes when its aim becomes merely mercenary enterprise.
+
+If Sir John Millais, Sir Frederick Leighton, Mr. Orchardson, Mr. Hook,
+and Mr. Watts were to die tomorrow, their places could be filled by
+men who are not and never will be in the Academy; but among the
+Associates there is no name that does not suggest a long decline: Mr.
+Macbeth, Mr. Leader, Mr. David Murray, Mr. Stanhope Forbes, Mr. J.
+MacWhirter. And are the coming Associates Mr. Hacker, Mr. Shannon, Mr.
+Solomon, Mr. Alfred East, Mr. Bramley? Mr. Swan has been passed over
+so many times that his election is beginning to seem doubtful. For
+very shame's sake the elder Academicians may bring their influence and
+insist on his election; but the City merchants' nominees are very
+strong, and will not have him if they can help it. They may yield to
+Mr. Swan, but no single inch further will it be possible to get them
+to go. Mr. Mouat Loudan, Mr. Lavery, Mr. Mark Fisher, and Mr.
+Peppercorn have no chance soever. Mr. Mouat Loudan, was rejected this
+year. Mr. Lavery's charming portrait of Lord McLaren's daughters was
+still more shamefully treated; it was "skied". Mr. Mark Fisher, most
+certainly our greatest living landscape-painter, had his picture
+refused; and Mr. Reid, a man who has received medals in every capital
+in Europe, has had his principal picture hung just under the ceiling.
+
+On varnishing-day Mr. Reid challenged Mr. Dicksee to give a reason for
+this disgraceful hanging; he defied him to say that he thought the
+pictures underneath were better pictures; and it is as impossible for
+me as it was for Mr. Dicksee to deny that Mr. Reid's picture is the
+best picture in Room 6. Mr. Peppercorn, another well-known artist, had
+his picture rejected. It is now hanging in the Goupil Galleries. I do
+not put it forward as a masterpiece, but I do say that it deserved a
+place in any exhibition, and if I had a friend on the Hanging
+Committee I would ask him to point to the landscapes on the Academy
+walls which he considers better than Mr. Peppercorn's.
+
+Often a reactionary says, "Name the good pictures that have been
+rejected; where can I see them? I want to see these masterpieces,"
+etc. The reactionary has generally the best of the argument. It is
+difficult to name the pictures that have been refused; they are the
+unknown quantity. Moreover, the pictures that are usually refused are
+tentative efforts, and not mature work. But this year the opponents of
+the Academy are able to cite some very substantial facts in support of
+their position, a portrait by our most promising portrait-painter and
+a landscape by the best landscape-painter alive in England having been
+rejected. The picture of the farm-yard which Mr. Fisher exhibited at
+the New English Art Club last autumn would not be out of place in the
+National Gallery. I do not say that the rejected picture is as good--I
+have not seen the rejected picture--but I do say that Mr. Fisher could
+not paint as badly as nine-tenths of the landscapes hanging in the
+Academy if he tried.
+
+The Academy is sinking steadily; never was it lower than this year;
+next year a few fine works may crop up, but they will be accidents,
+and will not affect the general tendency of the exhibitions nor the
+direction in which the Academy is striving to lead English art. Under
+the guidanceship of the Academy English art has lost all that charming
+naïveté and simplicity which was so long its distinguishing mark. At
+an Academy banquet, anything but the most genial optimism would be out
+of place, and yet Sir Frederick Leighton could not but allude to the
+disintegrating influence of French art. True, in the second part of
+the sentence he assured his listeners that the danger was more
+imaginary than real, and he hoped that with wider knowledge, etc. But
+if no danger need be apprehended, why did Sir Frederick trouble to
+raise the question? And if he apprehended danger and would save us
+from it, why did he choose to ask his friend M. Bouguereau to exhibit
+at the Academy?
+
+The allusion in Sir Frederick's speech to French methods, and the
+exhibition of a picture by M. Bouguereau in the Academy, is strangely
+significant. For is not M. Bouguereau the chief exponent of the art
+which Sir Frederick ventures to suggest may prove a disintegrating
+influence in our art?--has proven would be a more correct phrase. Let
+him who doubts compare the work of almost any of the elder
+Academicians with the work of those who practise the square brushwork
+of the French school. Compare, for instance, Sir Frederick's "Garden
+of the Hesperides" with Mr. Solomon's "Orpheus", and then you will
+appreciate the gulf that separates the elder Academicians from the men
+already chosen and marked out for future Academicians. And him whom
+this illustration does not convince I will ask to compare Mr. Hacker's
+"Annunciation" with any picture by Mr. Frith, or Mr. Faed, I will even
+go so far as to say with any work by Mr. Sidney Cooper, an
+octogenarian, now nearer his ninetieth than his eightieth year.
+
+It would have been better if Sir Frederick had told the truth boldly
+at the Academy banquet. He knows that a hundred years will hardly
+suffice to repair the mischief done by this detestable French
+painting, this mechanical drawing and modelling, built up
+systematically, and into which nothing of the artist's sensibility may
+enter. Sir Frederick hinted the truth, and I do not think it will
+displease him that I should say boldly what he was minded but did not
+dare to say. The high position he occupies did not allow him to go
+further than he did; the society of which he is president is now
+irreparably committed to Anglo-French art, and has, by every recent
+election, bound itself to uphold and impose this false and foreign art
+upon the nation.
+
+Out of the vast array of portraits and subject-pictures painted in
+various styles and illustrating every degree of ignorance, stupidity,
+and false education, one thing really comes home to the careful
+observer, and that is, the steady obliteration of all English feeling
+and mode of thought. The younger men practise an art purged of all
+nationality. England lingers in the elder painters, and though the
+representation is often inadequate, the English pictures are
+pleasanter than the mechanical art which has spread from Paris all
+over Europe, blotting out in its progress all artistic expression of
+racial instincts and mental characteristics. Nothing, for instance,
+can be more primitive, more infantile in execution, than Mr. Leslie's
+"Rose Queen". But it seems to me superficial criticism to pull it to
+pieces, for after all it suggests a pleasant scene, a stairway full of
+girls in white muslin; and who does not like pretty girls dressed in
+white muslin? And Mr. Leslie spares us the boredom of odious and
+sterile French pedantry.
+
+Mr. Waterhouse's picture of "Circe Poisoning the Sea" is an excellent
+example of professional French painting. The drawing is planned out
+geometrically, the modelling is built up mechanically. The brush,
+filled with thick paint, works like a trowel. In the hands of the
+Dutch and Flemish artists the brush was in direct communication with
+the brain, and moved slowly or rapidly, changing from the broadest and
+most emphatic stroke to the most delicate and fluent touch according
+to the nature of the work. But here all is square and heavy. The
+colour scheme, the blue dress and the green water--how theatrical, how
+its richness reeks of the French studio! How cosmopolitan and pedantic
+is this would-be romantic work!
+
+But can we credit Mr. Dicksee with any artistic intention in the
+picture he calls "Leila", hanging in the next room? I think not. Mr.
+Dicksee probably thought that having painted what the critics would
+call "somewhat sad subjects" last year, it would be well if he painted
+something distinctly gay this year. A girl in a harem struck him as a
+subject that would please every one, especially if he gave her a
+pretty face, a pretty dress, and posed her in a graceful attitude. A
+nice bright crimson was just the colour for the dress, the feet he
+might leave bare, and it would be well to draw them from the plaster
+cast--a pair of pretty feet would be sure to find favour with the
+populace. It is impossible to believe that Mr. Dicksee was moved by
+any deeper thought or impression when he painted this picture. The
+execution is not quite so childlike and bland as Mr. Leslie's; it is
+heavier and more stodgy. One is a cane chair from the Tottenham Court
+Road, the other is a dining-room chair from the Tottenham Court Road.
+In neither does any trace of French influence appear, and both
+painters are City-elected Academicians.
+
+A sudden thought.... Leader, Fildes, David Murray, Peter Graham,
+Herkomer.... Then it is not the City that favours the French school,
+but the Academy itself! And this shows how widely tastes may differ,
+yet remain equally sundered from good taste. I believe the north and
+the south poles are equidistant from the equator. Looking at Sir
+Frederick Leighton's picture, entitled "At the Fountain", I am forced
+to admit that, regarded as mere execution, it is quite as intolerably
+bad as Mr. Dicksee's "Leila". And yet it is not so bad a picture,
+because Sir Frederick's mind is a higher and better-educated mind than
+Mr. Dicksee's; and therefore, however his hand may fail him, there
+remains a certain habit of thought which always, even when worn and
+frayed, preserves something of its original aristocracy. "The Sea
+giving up its Dead" is an unpleasant memory of Michael Angelo. But in
+"The Garden of the Hesperides" Sir Frederick is himself, and nothing
+but himself. And the picture is so incontestably the work of an artist
+that I cannot bring myself to inquire too closely into its
+shortcomings. The merit of the picture is in the arabesque, which is
+charming and original. The maidens are not dancing, but sitting round
+their tree. On the right there is an olive, in the middle the usual
+strawberry-cream, and on the left a purple drapery. The brown water in
+the foreground balances the white sky most happily, and the faces of
+the women recall our best recollections of Sir Frederick's work. In
+the next room--Room 3--Mr. Watts exhibits a very incoherent work
+entitled "She shall be called Woman".
+
+The subject on which all of us are most nearly agreed--painters'
+critics and the general public--is the very great talent of Mr. G. F.
+Watts. Even the Chelsea studios unite in praising him. But were we
+ever sincere in our praise of him as we are sincere in our praise of
+Degas, Whistler, and Manet? And lately have we not begun to suspect
+our praise to-day is a mere clinging to youthful admirations which
+have no root in our present knowledge and aestheticisms? Perhaps the
+time has come to say what we do really think of Mr. Watts. We think
+that his very earliest pictures show, occasionally, the hand of a
+painter; but for the last thirty years Mr. Watts seems to have been
+undergoing transformation, and we see him now as a sort of cross
+between an alchemist of old time and a book collector--his left hand
+fumbling among the reds and blues of the old masters, his right
+turning the pages of a dusty folio in search of texts for
+illustration; a sort of a modern Veronese in treacle and gingerbread.
+To judge him by what he exhibits this year would not be just. We will
+select for criticism the celebrated portrait of Mrs. Percy Wyndham--in
+which he has obviously tried to realise all his artistic ideals.
+
+The first thing that strikes me on looking on this picture is the too
+obvious intention of the painter to invent something that could not go
+out of fashion. On sitting down to paint this picture the painter's
+mind seems to have been disturbed with all sorts of undetermined
+notions concerning the eternal Beautiful, and the formula discovered
+by the Venetian for its complete presentation. "The Venetians gave us
+the eternal Beautiful as civilisation presents it. Why not select in
+modern life all that corresponds to the Venetian formulae; why not
+profit by their experience in the selection I am called upon to make?"
+
+So do I imagine the painter's desire, and certainly the picture is
+from end to end its manifestation. Laurel leaves form a background for
+the head, and a large flower-vase is in the right-hand corner, and a
+balustrade is on the right; and this Anglo-Venetian lady is attired in
+a rich robe, brown, with green shades, and heavily embroidered; her
+elbow is leaned on a pedestal in a manner that shows off the
+plenitudes of the forearm, and for pensive dignity the hand is raised
+to the face. It is a noble portrait, and tells the story of a lifelong
+devotion to art, and yet it is difficult to escape from the suspicion
+that we are not very much interested, and that we find its compound
+beauty a little insipid. In avoiding the fashion of his day Mr. Watts
+seems to me to have slipped into an abstraction. The mere leaving out
+every accent that marks a dress as belonging to a particular epoch
+does not save it from going out of fashion. It is in the execution
+that the great artists annihilated the whim of temporary taste, and
+made the hoops of old time beautiful, however slim the season's
+fashions. To be of all time the artist must begin by being of his own
+time; and if he would find the eternal type he must seek it in his own
+parish.
+
+The painters of old Venice were entirely concerned with _l'idee
+plastique_, but on this point the art of Mr. Watts is a repudiation of
+the art of his masters. Abstract conceptions have been this long while
+a constant source of pollution in his work. Here, even in his
+treatment of the complexion, he seems to have been impelled by some
+abstract conception rather than by a pictorial sense of harmony and
+contrast, and partly for this reason his synthesis is not beautiful,
+like the conventional silver-grey which Velasquez used so often, or
+the gold-brown skins of Titian's women. The hand tells what was
+passing in the mind, and seeing that ugly shadow which marks the nose
+I know that the painter was not then engaged with the joy of purely
+material creation; had he been he could not have rested satisfied with
+so ugly a statement of a beautiful fact. And the forehead, too, where
+it comes into light, where it turns into shadow; the cheek, too, with
+its jawbone, and the evasive modelling under and below the eyes, are
+summarily rendered, and we think perforce of the supple, flowing
+modelling, so illusive, apparent only in the result, with which Titian
+would have achieved that face. Manet, an incomplete Hals, might have
+failed to join the planes, and in his frankness left out what he had
+not sufficiently observed; but he would have compensated us with a
+beautiful tone.
+
+For an illustration of Mr. Watts' drawing we will take the picture of
+"Love and Death", perhaps the most pictorially significant of all Mr.
+Watts' designs. The enormous figure of Death advances impressively
+with right arm raised to force the door which a terrified Love would
+keep closed against him. The figure of Death is draped in grey, the
+colour that Mr. Watts is most in sympathy with and manages best. But
+the upper portion of the figure is vast, and the construction beneath
+the robe too little understood for it not to lack interest; and in the
+raised arm and hand laid against the door, where power and delicacy of
+line were indispensable for the pictorial beauty of the picture, we
+are vouchsafed no more than a rough statement of rudimentary fact.
+Love is thrown back against the door, his right arm raised, his right
+leg advanced in action of resistance to the intruder. The movement is
+well conceived, and we regret that so summary a line should have been
+thought sufficient expression. Any one who has ever held a pencil in a
+school of art knows how a young body, from armpit to ankle-bone, flows
+with lovely line. Any one who has been to the Louvre knows the passion
+with which Ingres would follow this line, simplifying it and drawing
+it closer until it surpassed all melody. But in Mr. Watts' picture the
+boy's natural beauty is lost in a coarse and rough planing out that
+tells of an eye that saw vaguely and that wearied, and in an execution
+full of uncertain touch and painful effort. Unless the painter is
+especially endowed with the instinct of anatomies, the sentiment of
+proportion, and a passion for form, the nude is a will-o'-the-wisp,
+whose way leads where he may not follow. No one suspects Mr. Watts of
+one of these qualifications; he appears even to think them of but
+slight value, and his quest of the allegorical seems to be merely
+motived by an unfortunate desire to philosophise.
+
+As a colourist Mr. Watts is held in high esteem, and it is as a
+colourist that his admirers consider his claim to the future to be
+best founded. Beautiful passages of colour are frequently to be met
+with in his work, and yet it would be difficult to say what colour
+except grey he has shown any mastery over. A painter may paint with an
+exceedingly reduced palette, like Chardin, and yet be an exquisite
+colourist. To colour well does not consist in the employment of bright
+colours, but in the power of carrying the dominant note of colour
+through the entire picture, through the shadows as well as the
+half-tints, and Chardin's grey we find everywhere, in the bloom of a
+peach as well as in a decanter of rich wine; and how tender and
+persuasive it is! Mr. Watts' grey would seem coarse, common,
+uninteresting beside it. Reds and blues and yellows do not disappear
+from Mr. Watts' palette as they do from Rembrandt's; they are there,
+but they are usually so dirtied that they appear like a monochrome.
+Can we point to any such fresh, beautiful red as the scarf that the
+"Princesse des Pays de la Porcelaine" wears about that grey which
+would have broken Chardin's heart with envy? Can we point to any blue
+in Mr. Watts' as fresh and as beautiful as the blue carpet under the
+Princess's feet?
+
+With what Mr. Watts paints it is impossible to say. On one side an
+unpleasant reddish brown, scrubbed till it looks like a mud-washed
+rock; on the other a crumbling grey, like the rind of a Stilton
+cheese. The nude figure in the reeds--the picture purchased for the
+Chantrey Fund collection--will serve for illustration. It is clearly
+the work of a man with something incontestably great in his soul, but
+why should so beautiful a material as oil paint be transformed into a
+crumbly substance like--I can think of nothing else but the rind of a
+Stilton cheese. Mr. Watts and Mr. Burne-Jones seem to have convinced
+themselves that imaginative work can only be expressed in wool-work
+and gum. A strange theory, for which I find no authority, even if I
+extend my inquiry as far back as Mantegna and Botticelli. True, that
+the method of these painters is archaic, the lights are narrowed, and
+the shadows broadened; nevertheless, their handling of oil colour is
+nearer to Titian's than either Mr. Watts' or Mr. Burne-Jones'.
+
+It is one of the platitudes of art criticism to call attention to the
+length of the necks of Rossetti's women, and thereby to infer that the
+painter could not draw. True, Rossetti was not a skilful draughtsman,
+but not because the necks of his women are too long. The relation
+between good drawing and measurement is slight. The first quality in
+drawing, without which drawing does not exist, is an individual seeing
+of the object. This Rossetti most certainly had; there his
+draughtsmanship began and ended. But the question lies rather with
+handling than with drawing, and Rossetti sometimes handled paint very
+skilfully. The face and hair of the half-length Venus surrounded with
+roses is excellent in quality; the roses and the honeysuckle are quite
+beautiful in quality; they are fresh and bright, pure in colour, as if
+they had just come from the garden. The "Annunciation" in the National
+Gallery is a little sandy, but it cannot be said to be bad in quality,
+as Mr. Watts' and Mr. Jones' pictures are bad. Every Rossetti is at
+least clearly recognisable as an oil painting.
+
+In the same room there is Mr. Orchardson's picture of "Napoleon
+dictating the Account of his Campaigns". I gather from my notes the
+trace of the disappointment that this picture caused me. "Two small
+figures in a large canvas. The secretary sits on the right at a small
+table. He looks up, his face turned towards Napoleon, who stands on
+the left in the middle of the picture, looking down, studying the maps
+with which the floor is strewn. A great simplicity in the
+surroundings, and all the points of character insisted on, with the
+view of awakening the spectator's curiosity. From first to last a
+vicious desire to narrate an anecdote. It is strange that a man of Mr.
+Orchardson's talent should participate so fully in the supreme vice of
+modern art which believes a picture to be the same thing as a scene in
+a play. The whole picture conceived and executed in that pale yellow
+tint which seems to be the habitual colour of Mr. Orchardson's mind."
+A pity, indeed it is that Mr. Orchardson should waste very real talent
+in narratives, for he is a great portrait painter. I remember very
+well that beautiful portrait of his wife and child, and will take this
+opportunity to recall it. It is the finest thing he has done; finer
+than the portrait of Mr. Gilbey. Here, in a few words, is the subject
+of the picture. An old-fashioned cane sofa stretches right across the
+canvas. A lady in black is seated on the right; she bends forward, her
+left arm leaning over the back of the sofa; she holds in her hand a
+Japanese hand-screen. The fine and graceful English profile is
+modelled without vulgar roundness, _un beau modèle à plat_; and the
+black hair is heavy and loose, one lock slipping over the forehead.
+The painter has told the exact character of the hair as he has told
+the character of the hand, and the age of the hand and hair is
+evident. She is a woman of five-and-thirty, she is interested in her
+baby, her first baby, as a woman of that age would be. The baby lies
+on a woollen rug and cushion, just beneath the mother's eyes; the
+colour of both is a reddish yellow. He holds up his hands for the
+hand-screen that the mother waves about him. The strip of background
+about the yellow cane-work is grey-green; there is a vase of dried
+ferns and grasses on the left, and the whole picture is filled and
+penetrated with the affection and charm of English home-life, and
+without being disfigured with any touch of vulgar or commonplace
+sentimentality. The baby's face is somewhat hard; it is, perhaps, the
+least satisfactory thing in the picture. The picture is wanting in
+that totality which we find in the greatest masters--for instance, in
+that exquisite portrait of a mother and child by Sir Joshua Reynolds,
+exhibited this year in the Guildhall--that beautiful portrait of the
+mother holding out her babe at arms'-length above her knee.
+
+Room 4 is remarkable for Stanhope Forbes' picture of "Forging the
+Anchor". Mr. Stanhope Forbes is the last-elected Academician, and the
+most prominent exponent of the art of Bastien-Lepage. Perhaps the most
+instructive article that could be written on the Academy would be one
+in which the writer would confine his examination to this and Mr.
+Clausen's picture of "Mowers", comparing and contrasting the two
+pictures at every point, showing where they diverge, and tracing their
+artistic history back to its ultimate source. But to do this
+thoroughly would be to write the history of the artistic movement in
+France and England for the last thirty years; and I must limit myself
+to pointing out that Mr. Clausen has gone back to first principles,
+whereas Mr. Stanhope Forbes still continues at the point where
+Bastien-Lepage began to curtail, deform, and degrade the original
+inspiration. Mr. Clausen, I said, overcame the difficulty of the
+trousers by generalisation. Mr. Stanhope Forbes copied the trousers
+seam by seam, patch by patch; and the ugliness of the garment bores
+you in the picture, exactly as it would in nature. And the same
+criticism applies equally well to the faces, the hands, the leather
+aprons, the loose iron, the hammers, the pincers, the smoked walls. I
+should not be surprised to learn that Mr. Stanhope Forbes had had a
+forge built up in his studio, and had copied it all as it stood. A
+handful of dry facts instead of a passionate impression of life in its
+envelope of mystery and suggestion.
+
+Realism, that is to say the desire to compete with nature, to be
+nature, is the disease from which art has suffered most in the last
+twenty years. The disease is now at wane, and when we happen upon a
+canvas of the period like "Labourers after Dinner", we cry out, "What
+madness! were we ever as mad as that?" The impressionists have been
+often accused of a desire to dispense with the element of beauty, but
+the accusation has always seemed to me to be quite groundless, and
+even memory of a certain portrait by Mr. Walter Sickert does not cause
+me to falter in this opinion. Until I saw Mr. Clausen's "Labourers" I
+did not fully realise how terrible a thing art becomes when divorced
+from beauty, grace, mystery, and suggestion. It would be difficult to
+say where and how this picture differs from a photograph; it seems to
+me to be little more than the vices of photography magnified. Having
+spoken so plainly, it is necessary that I should explain myself.
+
+The subject of this picture is a group of field labourers finishing
+their mid-day dinner in the shade of some trees. They are portrayed in
+a still even light, exactly as they were; the picture is one long
+explanation; it is as clear as a newspaper, and it reads like one. We
+can tell how many months that man in the foreground has worn those
+dreadful hobnailed boots; we can count the nails, and we notice that
+two or three are missing. Those disgusting corduroy trousers have hung
+about his legs for so many months; all the ugliness of these
+labourers' faces and the solid earthiness of their lives are there;
+nothing has been omitted, curtailed, or exaggerated. There is some
+psychology. We see that the years have brought the old man cunning
+rather than wisdom. The middle-aged man and the middle-aged woman live
+in mute stupidity--they have known nothing but the daily hardship of
+living, and the vacuous face of their son tells how completely the
+life of his forefathers has descended upon him. Here there is neither
+the foolish gaiety of Teniers' peasants nor the vicious animality of
+Brouwers'; and it is hardly necessary to say that the painter has seen
+nothing of the legendary patriarchal beauty and solemnity which lends
+so holy a charm to Millet's Breton folk. Mr. Clausen has seen nothing
+but the sordid and the mean, and his execution in this picture is as
+sordid and as mean as his vision. There is not a noble gesture
+expressive of weariness nor an attitude expressive of resignation. Mr.
+Clausen seems to have said, "I will go lower than the others; I will
+seek my art in the mean and the meaningless." But notwithstanding his
+very real talent, Mr. Clausen has not found art where art is not,
+where art never has been found, where art never will be found.
+
+Looking at this picture, the ordinary man will say, "If such ugliness
+as that exists, I don't want to see it. Why paint such subjects?" And
+at least the first part of this criticism seems to me to be quite
+incontrovertible. I can imagine no valid reason for the portrayal of
+so much ugliness; and, what is more important, I can find among the
+unquestioned masters no slightest precedent for the blank realism of
+this picture. The ordinary man's aversion to such ugliness seems to me
+to be entirely right, and I only join issue with him when he says,
+"Why paint such subjects?" Why not? For all subjects contain elements
+of beauty; ugliness does not exist for the eye that sees beautifully,
+and meanness vanishes if the sensation is a noble one. Have not the
+very subjects which Mr. Clausen sees so meanly, and which he degrades
+below the level even of the photograph, been seen nobly, and have they
+not been rendered incomparably touching, even august, by----Well, the
+whole world knows by whom. But it will be said that Mr, Clausen
+painted these people as he saw them. I dare say he did; but if he
+could not see these field-folk differently, he should have abstained
+from painting them.
+
+The mission of art is not truth, but beauty; and I know of no great
+work--I will go even further, I know no even tolerable work--in
+literature or in painting in which the element of beauty does not
+inform the intention. Art is surely but a series of conventions which
+enable us to express our special sense of beauty--for beauty is
+everywhere, and abounds in subtle manifestations. Things ugly in
+themselves become beautiful by association; or perhaps I should say
+that they become picturesque. The slightest insistance in a line will
+redeem and make artistically interesting the ugliest face. Look at
+Degas' ballet-girls, and say if, artistically, they are not beautiful.
+I defy you to say that they are mean. Again, an alteration in the
+light and shade will create beautiful pictures among the meanest brick
+buildings that ever were run up by the jerry-builder. See the violet
+suburb stretching into the golden sunset. How exquisite it has become!
+how full of suggestion and fairy tale! A picturesque shadow will
+redeem the squalor of the meanest garret, and the subdued light of the
+little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping must
+contrast so delicately with the white glare of the brick yard where
+the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the
+humble life of the place is transformed and poetised. This was the ABC
+of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the
+poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace
+incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures.
+
+There are no merits in painting except technical merits; and though my
+criticism of Mr. Clausen's picture may at first sight seem to be a
+literary criticism, it is in truth a strictly technical criticism. For
+Mr. Clausen has neglected the admirable lessons which our Dutch
+cousins taught us two hundred years ago; he has neglected to avail
+himself of those principles of chiaroscuro which they perfected, and
+which would have enabled him to redeem the grossness, the ugliness,
+the meanness inherent in his subject. I said that he had gone further,
+in abject realism, than a photograph. I do not think I have
+exaggerated. It is not probable that those peasants would look so ugly
+in a photograph as they do in his picture. For had they been
+photographed, the chances are that some shadow would have clothed,
+would have hid, something, and a chance gleam might have concentrated
+the attention on some particular spot. Nine times out of ten the
+exposure of the plate would not have taken place in a moment of flat
+grey light.
+
+But it is the theory of Mr. Clausen and his school that it is right
+and proper to take a six-foot canvas into the open, and paint the
+entire picture from Nature. But when the sun is shining, it is not
+possible to paint for more than an hour--an hour and a half at most.
+At the end of that time the shadows have moved so much that the effect
+is wholly different. But on a grey day it is possible to paint on the
+same picture for four or five hours. Hence the preference shown by
+this school for grey days. Then the whole subject is seen clearly,
+like a newspaper; and the artist, if he is a realist, copies every
+patch on the trousers, and does not omit to tell us how many nails
+have fallen from the great clay-stained boots. Pre-Raphaelitism is
+only possible among august and beautiful things, when the subjects of
+the pictures are Virgins and angels, and the accessories are marbles,
+agate columns, Persian carpets, gold enwoven robes and vestments,
+ivories, engraven metals, pearls, velvets and silks, and when the
+object of the painter is to convey a sensation of the beauty of these
+materials by the luxury and beauty of the workmanship. The common
+workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy
+breeches and clay-pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses
+through a mystery of light and shade.
+
+Beauty of some sort there must be in a work of art, and the very
+conditions under which Mr. Clausen painted precluded any beauty from
+entering into his picture. But this year Mr. Clausen seems to have
+shaken himself free from his early education, and he exhibits a
+picture, conceived in an entirely different spirit, in this Academy.
+Turning to my notes I find it thus described: "A small canvas
+containing three mowers in a flowering meadow. Two are mowing; the
+third, a little to the left, sharpens his scythe. The sky is deep and
+lowering--a sultry summer day, a little unpleasant in colour, but
+true. At the end of the meadow the trees gleam. The earth is wrapped
+in a hot mist, the result of the heat, and through it the sun sheds a
+somewhat diffused and oven-like heat. There are heavy clouds overhead,
+for the gleam that passes over the three white shirts is transitory
+and uncertain. The handling is woolly and unpleasant, but handling can
+be overlooked when a canvas exhales a deep sensation of life. The
+movement of mowing--I should have said movements, for the men mow
+differently; one is older than the other--is admirably expressed. And
+the principal figure, though placed in the immediate foreground, is in
+and not out of the atmosphere. The difficulty of the trousers has been
+overcome by generalisation; the garment has not been copied patch by
+patch. The distribution of light is admirable; nowhere does it escape
+from the frame. J. F. Millet has painted many a worse picture."
+
+Mr. Solomon and Mr. Hacker have both turned to mythology for the
+subjects of their pictures. And the beautiful and touching legends of
+Orpheus, and the Annunciation, have been treated by them with the
+indifference of "our special artist", who places the firemen on the
+right, the pump on the left, and the blazing house in the middle of
+the picture. These pictures are therefore typical of a great deal of
+historical painting of our time; and I speak of them because they give
+me an opportunity of pointing out that before deciding to treat a page
+of history or legend, the painter should come to conclusions with
+himself regarding the goal which he desires to obtain. There are but
+two.
+
+Either the legend passes unperceived in pomp of colour and wealth of
+design, or the picture is a visible interpretation of the legend. The
+Venetians were able to disregard the legend, but in centuries less
+richly endowed with pictorial genius painters are inclined to support
+their failing art with the psychological interest their imaginations
+draw from it. But imaginative interpretation should not be confused
+with bald illustration. The Academicians cannot understand why, if we
+praise "Dante seeing Beatrice in a Dream", we should vilify Mr.
+Fildes' "Doctor". In both cases a story is told, in neither case is
+the execution excellent. Why then should one be a picture and the
+other no more than a bald illustration? The question is a vexed one,
+and the only conclusion that we can draw seems to be that
+sentimentality pollutes, the anecdote degrades, wit altogether ruins;
+only great thought may enter into art. Rossetti is a painter we
+admire, and we place him above Mr. Fildes, because his interpretations
+are more imaginative. We condone his lack of pictorial power, because
+he could think, and we appreciate his Annunciation--the "Ecce Ancilla
+Domini!" in the National Gallery, principally because he has looked
+deep into the legend, and revealed its true and human significance.
+
+It is a small picture, about three feet by two, and is destitute of
+all technical accomplishment, or even habit. It is painted in white
+and blue, and the streak of red in the foreground, the red of a screen
+on which is embroidered the lily--emblem of purity--adds to the chill
+and coldness. Drawn up upon her white bed the Virgin crouches, silent
+with expectation, listening to the mystic dream that has come upon her
+in the dim hush of dawn. The large blue eyes gleam with some strange
+joy that is quickening in her. The mouth and chin tell no tale, but
+the eyes are deep pools of light, and mirror the soul that is on fire
+within. The red hair falls about her, a symbol of the soul. In the
+drawn-up knees, faintly outlined beneath the white sheet, the painter
+hints at her body's beauty. One arm is cast forward, the hand not
+clenched but stricken. Behind her a blue curtain hangs straight from
+iron rods set on either side of the bed. Above the curtain a lamp is
+burning dimly, blighted by the pallor of the dawn. A dead, faint
+sky--the faint ashen sky which precedes the first rose tint; the
+circular window is filled with it, and the paling blue of the sky's
+colour contrasts with the deep blue of the bed's curtain, on which the
+Virgin's red hair is painted.
+
+The angel stands by the side of the white bed--I should say floats,
+his fair feet hanging out of a few pale flames. White raiment clothes
+him, falling in long folds, leaving the arms and feet bare; in the
+right hand he holds a lily all in blossom; the left hand is extended
+in rigid gesture of warning. Brown-gold hair grows thick about the
+angel's neck; the shadowed profile is outlined against the hard, sad
+sky; the expression of the face is deep and sphinx-like; he has come,
+it is clear, from vast realms of light, where uncertainty and doubt
+are unknown. The Dove passes by him towards the Virgin. Look upon her
+again, crouching in her white bed, her knees drawn to her bosom, her
+deep blue eyes--her dawn-tinted eyes--filled with ache, dream, and
+expectation. The shadows of dawn are on wall and floor--strange, blue
+shadows!--the Virgin's shadow lies on the wall, the angel's shadow
+falls across the coverlet.
+
+Here, at least, there is drama, and the highest form of
+drama--spiritual drama; here, at least, there is story, and the
+highest form of story--symbol and suggestion. Rossetti has revealed
+the essence of this intensely human story--a story that, whenever we
+look below the surface, which is mediaeval and religious, we recognise
+as a story of to-day, of yesterday, of all time. A girl thralled by
+the mystery of conception awakes at morn in palpitations, seeing
+visions.
+
+Mr. Hacker's telling of the legend is to Rossetti's what a story in
+the _London Journal_ is to a story by Balzac. The Virgin has
+apparently wandered outside the town. She is dressed in a long white
+garment neither beautiful nor explicit: is it a nightdress, or a piece
+of conventional drapery? On the right there is a long, silly tree,
+which looks as if it had been evolved out of a ball of green wool with
+knitting-needles, and above her floats an angel attired in a wisp of
+blue gauze. Rossetti, we know, was, in the strict sense of the word,
+hardly a painter at all, but he had something to say; and we can bear
+in painting, as we can in literature, with faulty expression, if there
+is something behind it. What is most intolerable in art is scholastic
+rodomontade. And what else is Mr. Hacker's execution? In every
+transmission the method seems to degenerate, and in this picture it
+seems to have touched bottom. It has become loose, all its original
+crispness is lost, and, complicated with _la peinture claire_, it
+seems incapable of expressing anything whatsoever. There is no variety
+of tone in that white sheet, there is nobody inside it, and the angel
+is as insincere and frivolous as any sketch in a young lady's album.
+The building at the back seems to have been painted with the scrapings
+of a dirty palette, and the sky in the left-hand corner comes out of
+the picture. I have only to add that the picture has been purchased
+out of the Chantry Bequest Fund, and the purchase is considered to be
+equivalent to a formal declaration that Mr. Hacker will be elected an
+Associate of the Royal Academy at the next election.
+
+Mr. Hacker's election to the Academy--I speak of this election as a
+foregone conclusion--following as it does the election of Mr. Stanhope
+Forbes, makes it plain that the intention of the Academy is to support
+to the full extent of its great power a method of painting which is
+foreign and unnatural to English art, which, in the opinion of a large
+body of artists--and it is valuable to know that their opinion is
+shared by the best and most original of the French artists--is
+disintegrating and destroying our English artistic tradition. Mr.
+Hacker's election, and the three elections that will follow it, those
+of Mr. Shannon, Mr. Alfred East, and Mr. Bromley, will be equivalent
+to an official declaration that those who desire to be English
+Academicians must adopt the French methods. Independent of the
+national disaster that these elections will inflict on art, they will
+be moreover flagrant acts of injustice. For I repeat, among the forty
+Academicians there is not one who considers these future Academicians
+to be comparable to Mr. Whistler, Mr. Albert Moore, Mr. Swan, or Mr.
+Sargent. No one holds such an opinion, and yet there is no doubt which
+way the elections in the Academy will go.
+
+The explanation of this incredible anomaly I have given, the
+explanation is not a noble one, but that is not a matter for which I
+can be held responsible; suffice it to say, that my explanation is the
+only possible explanation. The Academy is a private commercial
+enterprise, and conducts its business on the lines which it considers
+the most advantageous; its commercialism has become flagrant and
+undeniable. If this is so--how the facts can otherwise be explained I
+cannot see--it is to be regretted that the Academy got its beautiful
+site for nothing. But regrets are vain. The only thing to do now is to
+see that the Academy is no longer allowed to sail under false colours.
+This article may awaken in the Academy a sense that it is not well to
+persist in open and flagrant defiance of public opinion, or it may
+serve to render the Academicians even more stiff-necked than before.
+In either case it will have accomplished its purpose.
+
+
+
+
+THE ORGANISATION OF ART.
+
+
+No fact is more painful to the modern mind than that men are not born
+with equal brains; and every day we grow more and more determined to
+thwart Nature's desire of inequality by public education. Whether
+everybody should be taught to read and write I leave to
+politicians--the matter is not important; but that the nation should
+not be instructed in drawing, music, painting, and English literature
+I will never cease to maintain. Everything that has happened in
+England for the last thirty years goes to prove that systematised
+education in art means artistic decadence.
+
+To the ordinary mind there is something very reassuring in the words
+institutions, professors, examinations, medals, and titles of all
+kinds. All these things have been given of late years to art, and
+parents and guardians need no longer have any fear for those confided
+to their charge: the art of painting has been recognised as a
+profession! The principal institution where this profession is
+practised is called the Royal Academy. It owes its existence to the
+taste of a gentleman known as George the Third, and it has been
+dowered by the State to the extent of at least three hundred thousand
+pounds. Professors from Oxford, even bishops, dine there. The members
+of this institution put R.A. after their names; the president has been
+made a baronet; there was even a rumour that he was going to be made a
+lord, and that he was not we must consider as another blow dealt
+against the dignity of art.
+
+Literature does not offer so much scope for organisation as painting;
+but strenuous efforts are being made to organise it, and, by the aid
+of academies, examinations, and crowns, hopes are entertained that,
+before long, it will be brought into line with the other professions.
+And the journalists too are anxious to "erect their craft to the
+dignity of a profession which shall confer upon its members _certain
+social status_ like that of the barrister and lawyer". Entrance is to
+be strictly conditional; no one is to have a right to practice without
+a diploma, and members are to be entitled to certain letters after
+their names. A movement is on foot to Churton-Collinise English
+literature at the universities, and every month Mr. Walter Besant
+raises a wail in the _Author_ that the peerage is not as open to
+three-volume novelists as it is to brewers. He bewails the fact that
+no eminent man of letters, with the exception of Lord Tennyson, has
+been made the enforced associate of brewers and politicians. Mr.
+Besant does not think that titles in these democratic days are foolish
+and absurd, pitiful in the personality of those who own them by
+inheritance, grotesque in the personality of those on whom they have
+been conferred. Mr. Besant does not see that the desire of the baker,
+the brewer, the butcher, and I may add the three-volume novelist, to
+be addressed by small tradesmen and lackeys as "yer lordship", raises
+a smile on the lips even of the most _blasé_.
+
+I am advocating an unpopular _régime_ I know, for the majority believe
+that art is in Queer Street if new buildings are not being raised, if
+official recognition of merits is not proclaimed, and if the
+newspapers do not teem with paragraphs concerning the homes of the
+Academicians. The wailing and gnashing of teeth that were heard when
+an intelligent portion of the Press induced Mr. Tate to withdraw his
+offer to build a gallery and furnish it with pictures by Messrs.
+Herkomer, Fildes, Leader, Long, are not forgotten. It was not urged
+that the pictures were valuable pictures; the merit or demerit of the
+pictures was not what interested, but the fact that a great deal of
+money was going to be spent, and that titles, badges, medals, crowns,
+would be given to those whose pictures were enshrined in the new
+temple of art. The Tate Gallery touched these folk as would an
+imposing review of troops, a procession of judges, or a coronation in
+Westminster Abbey. Their senses were tickled by the prospect of a
+show, their minds were stirred by some idea of organisation--something
+was about to be organised, and nothing appeals so much to the vulgar
+mind as organisation.
+
+An epoch is represented by a word, and to organise represents the
+dominant idea of our civilisation. To organise is to be respectable,
+and as every one wants to be respectable, every one dreams of new
+schemes of organisation. Soldiers, sailors, policemen, members of
+parliament, independent voters, clerks in the post office, bus
+drivers, dockers, every imaginable variety of worker, domestic
+servants--it is difficult to think of any class that has not been
+organised of late years.
+
+There is a gentleman in parliament who is anxious to do something in
+the way of social organisation for the gipsies. The gipsies have not
+appealed to him; they have professed no desire to have their social
+status raised; they have, I believe, disclaimed through their king,
+whoever he may be, all participation in the scheme of this benevolent
+gentleman. Nor does any sense of the absurdity of his endeavour blight
+the worthy gentleman's ardour. How should it? He, like the other
+organisers, is an unreasoning instrument in a great tendency of
+things. To organise something--or, put it differently, to educate
+some one--is to day every man's ambition. So long as it is not
+himself, it matters no jot to him whom he educates. The gipsy under
+the hedge, the artist painting under a hill, it matters not. A
+technical school of instruction would enable the gipsy to harness his
+horse better than he does at present; and the artist would paint much
+better if he were taught to stipple, and examined by salaried
+professors in stipple, and given prizes for stippling. The general
+mind of our century is with education and organisation of every kind,
+and from this terrible general mind art seems unable to escape. Art,
+that poor little gipsy whose very condition of existence is freedom,
+who owns no code of laws, who evades all regulations, who groups
+himself under no standard, who can live only in disastrous times, when
+the world's attention is drawn to other things, and allows him life in
+shelter of the hedges, and dreams in sight of the stars, finds himself
+forced into a uniform--poor little fellow, how melancholy he looks on
+his high stool in the South Kensington Museum, and notwithstanding the
+professors his hand drops from the drawing-board, unable to accomplish
+the admired stipple.
+
+But solemn members of parliament are certain that official recognition
+must be extended to art. Art is an educational influence, and the
+Kensington galleries are something more than agreeable places, where
+sweethearts can murmur soft nothings under divine masterpieces. The
+utilitarian M.P. must find some justification for art; he is not
+sensible enough to understand that art justifies its own existence,
+that it is its own honour and glory; and he nourishes a flimsy lie,
+and votes that large sums of money shall be spent in endowing schools
+of art and founding picture galleries. Then there is another
+class--those who have fish to fry, and to whom art seems a convenient
+frying-pan. Mr. Tate craves for a museum to be called Tate's; or, if
+his princely gift gained him a title, which it may, the museum would
+be called--What would be an appropriate name? There are men too who
+have trifles to sell, and they talk loudly of the glories of modern
+art, and the necessity of a British Luxembourg.
+
+That France should have a Luxembourg is natural enough; that we should
+have one would be anomalous. We are a free-trading country. I pass
+over the failure of the Luxembourg to recognise genius, to save the
+artist of genius a struggle with insolent ignorance. What did the
+Luxembourg do for Corot, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley,
+Pissaro? The Luxembourg chose rather to honour such pretentious
+mediocrities as Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Jules Breton, and their
+like. What has our Academy done to rescue struggling genius from
+poverty and obscurity? Did it save Alfred Stevens, the great sculptor
+of his generation, from the task of designing fire-irons? How often
+did the Academy refuse Cecil Lawson's pictures? When they did accept
+him, was it not because he had become popular in spite of the Academy?
+Did not the Academy refuse Mr. Whistler's portrait of his mother, and
+was it not hung at the last moment owing to a threat of one of the
+Academicians to resign if a place was not found for it? Place was
+found for it seven feet above the line. Has not the Academy for the
+last five-and-twenty years lent the whole stress and authority of its
+name to crush Mr. Whistler? Happily his genius was sufficient for the
+fight, and it was not until he had conquered past all question that he
+left this country. The record of the Academy is a significant one. But
+if it has exercised a vicious influence in art, its history is no
+worse than that of other academies. Here, as elsewhere, the Academy
+has tolerated genius when it was popular, and when it was not popular
+it has trampled upon it.
+
+We have Free Trade in literature, why should we not have Free Trade in
+art? Why should not every artist go into the market without title or
+masquerade that blinds the public to the value of what he has to sell?
+I would turn art adrift, titleless, R.A.-less, out into the street and
+field, where, under the light of his original stars, the impassioned
+vagrant might dream once more, and for the mere sake of his dreams.
+
+
+
+
+ART AND SCIENCE.
+
+
+"Mr. Goschen," said a writer in a number of the _Speaker_, "deserves
+credit for having successfully resisted the attempt to induce him to
+sacrifice the interests of science at South Kensington to those of
+art." An excellent theme it seemed to me for an article; but the
+object of the writer being praise of Mr. Tate for his good intention,
+the opportunity was missed of distinguishing between the false claims
+of art and the real claims of science to public patronage and
+protection. True it is that to differentiate between art and science
+is like drawing distinctions between black and white; and in excuse I
+must plead the ordinary vagueness and weakness of the public mind, its
+inability very often to differentiate between things the most opposed,
+and a very general tendency to attempt to justify the existence of art
+on the grounds of utility--that is to say, educational influences and
+the counter attraction that a picture gallery offers to the
+public-house on Bank Holidays. Such reasoning is well enough at
+political meetings, but it does not find acceptance among thinkers. It
+is merely the flower of foolish belief that nineteenth century wisdom
+is greater than the collective instinct of the ages; that we are far
+in advance of our forefathers in religion, in morals, and in art. We
+are only in advance of our forefathers in science. In art we have done
+little more than to spoil good canvas and marble, and not content with
+such misdeeds, we must needs insult art by attributing to her
+utilitarian ends and moral purposes.
+
+Modern puritanism dares not say abolish art; so in thinly disguised
+speech it is pleaded that art is not nearly so useless as might easily
+be supposed; and it is often seriously urged that art may be
+reconciled after all with the most approved principles of
+humanitarianism, progress, and religious belief. Such is still the
+attitude of many Englishmen towards art. But art needs none of these
+apologists, even if we have to admit that the domestic utility of a
+Terburg is not so easily defined as that of mixed pickles or
+umbrellas. Another serious indictment is that art appeals rather to
+the few than to the many. True, indeed; and yet art is the very spirit
+and sense of the many. Yes; and all that is most national in us, all
+that is most sublime, and all that is most imperishable. The art of a
+nation is an epitome of the nation's intelligence and prosperity.
+There is no such thing as cosmopolitanism in art? alas! there is, and
+what a pitiful thing that thing is.
+
+Unhappy is he who forgets the morals, the manners, the customs, the
+material and spiritual life of his country! England can do without any
+one of us, but not one of us can do without England. Study the
+question in the present, study it in the past, and you will find but
+one answer to your question--art is nationhood. All the great artistic
+epochs have followed on times of national enthusiasm, power, energy,
+spiritual and corporal adventure. When Greece was divided into
+half-a-dozen States she produced her greatest art. The same with
+Italy; and Holland, after having rivalled Greece in heroic effort,
+gave birth in the space of a single generation to between twenty and
+thirty great painters. And did not our Elizabethan drama follow close
+upon the defeat of the Armada, the discovery of America, and the
+Reformation? And did not Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney begin to
+paint almost immediately after the victories of Marlborough? To-day
+our empire is vast, and as our empire grows so does our art lessen.
+Literature still survives, though even there symptoms of decadence are
+visible. The Roman, the Chinese, and the Mahometan Empires are not
+distinguished for their art. But outside of the great Chinese Empire
+there lies a little State called Japan, which, without knowledge of
+Egypt or Greece, purely out of its own consciousness, evolved an art
+strangely beautiful and wholly original.
+
+And as we continue to examine the question we become aware that no
+further progress in art is possible; that art reached its apogee two
+thousand five hundred years ago. True that Michael Angelo in the
+figures of "Day" and "Night", in the "Slave", in the "Moses", and in
+the "Last Judgment"--which last should be classed as sculpture--stands
+very, very close indeed to Phidias; his art is more complete and less
+perfect. But three hundred years have gone since the death of Michael
+Angelo, and to get another like him the world would have to be steeped
+in the darkness of another Middle Age. And, passing on in our inquiry,
+we notice that painting reached its height immediately after Michael
+Angelo's death. Who shall rival the splendours, the profusion of
+Veronese, the opulence of Tintoretto, the richness of Titian, the pomp
+of Rubens? Or who shall challenge the technical beauty of Velasquez or
+of Hals, or the technical dexterity of Terburg, or Metzu, or Dow, or
+Adrian van Ostade? Passing on once again, we notice that art appears
+and disappears mysteriously like a ghost. It comes unexpectedly upon a
+people, and it goes in spite of artistic education, State help, picture
+dealers, and annual exhibitions. We notice, too, that art is wholly
+untransmissible; nay, more, the fact that art is with us to-day is proof
+that art will not be with us to-morrow. Art cannot be acquired, nor can
+those who have art in their souls tell how it came there, or how they
+practise it. Art cannot be repressed, encouraged, or explained; it is
+something that transcends our knowledge, even as the principle of life.
+
+Now I take it that science differs from art on all these points.
+Science is not national, it is essentially cosmopolitan. The science
+of one country is the same as that of another country. It is
+impossible to tell by looking at it whether the phonograph was
+invented in England or America. Unlike art, again, science is
+essentially transmissible; every discovery leads of necessity to
+another discovery, and the fact that science is with us to-day proves
+that science will be still more with us to-morrow. Nothing can
+extinguish science except an invasion of barbarians, and the
+barbarians that science has left alive would hardly suffice. Art has
+its limitations, science has none. It would, however, be vain to
+pursue our differentiation any further. It must be clear that what are
+most opposed in this world are art and science; therefore--I think I
+can say therefore--all the arguments I used to show that a British
+Luxembourg would be prejudicial to the true interests of art may be
+used in favour of the endowment of a college of science at South
+Kensington. Why should not the humanitarianism of Mr. Tate induce him
+to give his money to science instead of to art? As well build a
+hothouse for swallows to winter in as a British Luxembourg; but
+science is a good old barn-door fowl; build her a hen-roost, and she
+will lay you eggs, and golden eggs. Give your money to science, for
+there is an evil side to every other kind of almsgiving. It is well to
+save life, but the world is already overstocked with life; and in
+saving life one may be making the struggle for existence still more
+unendurable for those who come after. But in giving your money to
+science you are accomplishing a definite good; the results of science
+have always been beneficent. Science will alleviate the wants of the
+world more wisely than the kindest heart that ever beat under the robe
+of a Sister of Mercy; the hands of science are the mercifulest in the
+end, and it is science that will redeem man's hope of Paradise.
+
+
+
+
+ROYALTY IN ART.
+
+
+The subject is full of suggestion, and though any adequate examination
+of it would lead me beyond the limits of this paper, I think I may
+venture to lift its fringe. To do so, we must glance at its historic
+side. We know the interest that Julius the Second took in the art of
+Michael Angelo and Raphael: had it not been for the Popes, St. Peter's
+would not have been built, nor would "The Last Judgment" have been
+painted. We know, too, of Philip the Fourth's great love of the art of
+Velasquez. The Court of Frederick the Great was a republic of art and
+letters; and is it not indirectly to a Bavarian monarch that we owe
+Wagner's immortal _chefs-d'oeuvre_, and hence the musical evolution of
+the century? With these facts before us it would be puerile to deny
+that in the past Royalty has lent invaluable assistance in the
+protection and development of art. Even if we turn to our own country
+we find at least one monarch who could distinguish a painter when he
+met one. Charles the Second did not hesitate in the patronage he
+extended to Vandyke, and it is--as I have frequently pointed out--to
+the influence of Vandyke that we owe all that is worthiest and
+valuable in English art. Bearing these facts in mind--and it is
+impossible not to bear them in mind--it is difficult to go to the
+Victorian Exhibition and not ask: Does the present Royal Family
+exercise any influence on English art? This is the question that the
+Victorian Exhibition puts to us. After fifty years of reign, the Queen
+throws down the gauntlet; and speaking through the medium of the
+Victorian Exhibition, she says: "This is how I have understood art;
+this is what I have done for art; I countenance, I court, I challenge
+inquiry."
+
+Yes, truly the Victorian Exhibition is an object-lesson in Royalty. If
+all other records were destroyed, the historian, five hundred years
+hence, could reconstitute the psychological characteristics, the
+mentality, of the present reigning family from the pictures on
+exhibition there. For in the art that it has chosen to patronise (a
+more united family on the subject of art it would be hard to
+imagine--nowhere can we detect the slightest difference of opinion),
+the Queen, her spouse, and her children appear to be singularly
+_bourgeois_: a staid German family congenially and stupidly
+commonplace, accepting a little too seriously its mission of crowns
+and sceptres, and accomplishing its duties, grown out of date,
+somewhat witlessly, but with heavy dignity and forbearance. Waiving
+all racial characteristics, the German _bourgeois_ family mind appears
+plainly enough in all these family groups; no other mind could have
+permitted the perpetration of so much stolid family placidity, of so
+much "_frauism_". "Exhibit us in our family circle, in our coronation
+robes, in our wedding dresses, let the likeness be correct and the
+colours bright--we leave the rest to you." Such seems to have been the
+Royal artistic edict issued in the beginning of the present reign. In
+no instance has the choice fallen on a painter of talent; but the
+middling from every country in Europe seems to have found a ready
+welcome at the Court of Queen Victoria. We find there middling
+Germans, middling Italians, middling Frenchmen--and all receiving
+money and honour from our Queen.
+
+The Queen and the Prince Consort do not seem to have been indifferent
+to art, but to have deliberately, and with rare instinct, always
+picked out what was most worthless; and regarded in the light of
+documents, these pictures are valuable; for they tell plainly the real
+mind of the Royal Family. We see at once that the family mind is
+wholly devoid of humour; the very faintest sense of humour would have
+saved them from exhibiting themselves in so ridiculous a light. The
+large picture of the Queen and the Prince Consort surrounded with
+their children, the Prince Consort in knee-breeches, showing a
+finely-turned calf, is sufficient to occasion the overthrow of a
+dynasty if humour were the prerogative of the many instead of being
+that of the few. This masterpiece is signed, "By G. Belli, after F.
+Winterhalter"; and in this picture we get the mediocrity of Italy and
+Germany in quintessential strength. These pictures also help us to
+realise the private life of our Royal Family. It must have spent a
+great deal of time in being painted. The family pictures are
+numberless, and the family taste is visible upon them all. And there
+must be some strange magnetism in the family to be able to transfuse
+so much of itself into the minds of so many painters. So like is one
+picture to another, that the Exhibition seems to reveal the secret
+that for the last fifty years the family has done nothing but paint
+itself. And in these days, when every one does a little painting, it
+is easy to imagine the family at work from morn to eve. Immediately
+after breakfast the easels are set up, the Queen paints the Princess
+Louise, the Duke of Edinburgh paints Princess Beatrice, the Princess
+Alice paints the Prince of Wales, etc. The easels are removed for
+lunch, and the moment the meal is over work is resumed.
+
+After having seen the Victorian Exhibition, I cannot imagine the Royal
+Family in any other way; I am convinced that is how they must have
+passed their lives for the last quarter of a century. The names of G.
+Belli and F. Winterhalter are no more than flimsy make-believes. And
+are there not excellent reasons for holding to this opinion? Has not
+the Queen published, or rather surreptitiously issued, certain little
+collections of drawings? Has not the Princess Louise, the artist of
+the family, publicly exhibited sculpture? The Princess Beatrice, has
+she not done something in the way of designing? The Duke of Edinburgh,
+he is a musician. And it is in these little excursions into art that
+the family most truly manifests its _bourgeois_ nature. The sincerest
+_bourgeois_ are those who scribble little poems and smudge little
+canvases in the intervals between an afternoon reception and a
+dinner-party. The amateur artist is always the most inaccessible to
+ideas; he is always the most fervid admirer of the commonplace. A
+staid German family dabbling in art in its leisure hours--the most
+inartistic, the most Philistine of all Royal families--this is the
+lesson that the Victorian Exhibition impresses upon us.
+
+But why should not the Royal Family decorate its palaces with bad art?
+Why should it not choose the most worthless portrait-painters of all
+countries? Dynasties have never been overthrown for failure in
+artistic taste. I am aware how insignificant the matter must seem to
+the majority of readers, and should not have raised the question, but
+since the question has been raised, and by her Majesty, I am well
+within my right in attempting a reply. The Victorian Exhibition is a
+flagrant representation of a _bourgeois_, though a royal, family. From
+the beginning to the end the Exhibition is this and nothing but this.
+In the Entrance Hall, at the doorway, we are confronted with the
+Queen's chief artistic sin--Sir Edgar Boehm.
+
+Thirty years ago this mediocre German sculptor came to England. The
+Queen discovered him at once, as if by instinct, and she employed him
+on work that an artist would have shrunk from--namely, statuettes in
+Highland costume. The German sculptor turned out this odious and
+ridiculous costume as fast as any Scotch tailor. He was then employed
+on busts, and he did the entire Royal Family in marble. Again, it
+would be hard to give a reason why Royalty should not be allowed to
+possess bad sculpture. The pity is that the private taste of Royalty
+creates the public taste of the nation, and the public result of the
+gracious interest that the Queen was pleased to take in Mr. Edgar
+Boehm, is the disfigurement of London by several of the worst statues
+it is possible to conceive. It is bad enough that we should have
+German princes foisted upon us, but German statues are worse. The
+ancient site of Temple Bar has been disfigured by Boehm with statues
+of the Queen and the Prince of Wales, so stupidly conceived and so
+stupidly modelled that they look like figures out of a Noah's Ark. The
+finest site in London, Hyde Park Corner, has been disfigured by Boehm
+with a statue of the Duke of Wellington so bad, so paltry, so
+characteristically the work of a German mechanic, that it is
+impossible to drive down the beautiful road without experiencing a
+sensation of discomfort and annoyance. The original statue that was
+pulled down in the interests of Boehm was, it is true, bad English,
+but bad English suits the landscape better than cheap German. And this
+disgraceful thing will remain, disfiguring the finest site in London,
+until, perhaps, some dynamiter blows the thing up, ostensibly to serve
+the cause of Ireland, but really in the interests of art. At the other
+end of the park we have the Albert Memorial. We sympathise with the
+Queen in her grief for the Prince Consort, but we cannot help wishing
+that her grief were expressed more artistically.
+
+A city so naturally beautiful as London can do without statues; the
+question is not so much how to get good statues, but how to protect
+London against bad statues. If for the next twenty-five years we might
+celebrate the memory of each great man by the destruction of a statue
+we might undo a great part of the mischief for which Royalty is mainly
+responsible. I do not speak of Boehm's Jubilee coinage--the
+melting-pot will put that right one of these days--but his statues,
+beyond some slight hope from the dynamiters, will be always with us.
+Had he lived, London would have disappeared under his statues; at the
+time of his death they were popping up by twos and threes all over the
+town. Our lovely city is our inheritance; London should be to the
+Londoner what Athens is to the Athenian. What would the Athenians have
+thought of Pericles if he had proposed the ornamentation of the city
+with Persian sculpture? Boehm is dead, but another German will be with
+us before long, and, under Royal patronage, will continue the odious
+disfigurement of our city. If our Royal Family possessed any slight
+aesthetic sense its influence might be turned to the service of art;
+but as it has none, it would be well for Royalty to refrain. Art can
+take care of itself if left to the genius of the nation, and freed
+from foreign control. The Prince of Wales has never affected any
+artistic sympathies. For this we are thankful: we have nothing to
+reproach him with except the unfortunate "Roll-call" incident. Royalty
+is to-day but a social figment--it has long ago ceased to control our
+politics. Would that Royalty would take another step and abandon its
+influence in art.
+
+
+
+
+ART PATRONS.
+
+
+The general art patron in England is a brewer or distiller.
+Five-and-forty is the age at which he begins to make his taste felt in
+the art world, and the cause of his collection is the following, or an
+analogous reason. After a heavy dinner, when the smoke-cloud is
+blowing lustily, Brown says to Smith: "I know you don't care for
+pictures, so you wouldn't think that Leader was worth fifteen hundred
+pounds; well, I paid all that, and something more too, at the last
+Academy for it." Smith, who has never heard of Leader, turns slowly
+round on his chair, and his brain, stupefied with strong wine and
+tobacco, gradually becomes aware of a village by a river bank seen in
+black silhouette upon a sunset sky. Wine and food have made him
+happily sentimental, and he remembers having seen a village looking
+very like that village when he was paying his attentions to the eldest
+Miss Jones. Yes, it was looking like that, all quite sharp and clear
+on a yellow sky, and the trees were black and still just like those
+trees. Smith determines that he too shall possess a Leader. He may not
+be quite as big a man as Brown, but he has been doing pretty well
+lately.... There's no reason why he shouldn't have a Leader. So
+irredeemable mischief has been done at Brown's dinner-party: another
+five or six thousand a year will henceforth exert its mighty influence
+in the service of bad art.
+
+Poor Smith, who never looked attentively at a picture before, does not
+see that what inspires such unutterable memories of Ethel Jones is but
+a magnified Christmas card; the dark trees do not suggest treacle to
+him, nor the sunset sky the rich cream which he is beginning to feel
+he partook of too freely; he does not see the thin drawing, looking as
+if it had been laboriously scratched out with a nail, nor yet the
+feeble handling which suggests a child and a pot of gum. But of
+technical achievement how should Mr. Smith know anything?--that
+mysterious something, different in every artist, taking a thousand
+forms, and yet always recognisable to the educated eye. How should
+poor Smith see anything in the picture except what Mr. Whistler
+wittily calls "rather a foolish sunset"? To perceive Mr. Leader's
+deficiency in technical accomplishment may seem easy to the young girl
+who has studied drawing for six months at South Kensington; but Smith
+is a stupid man who has money-grubbed for five-and-twenty years in the
+City; and through the fumes of wine and tobacco he resolves to have a
+Leader. He does not hesitate, he consults no one--and why should he?
+Mr. Leader put R.A. after his name--he charges fifteen hundred.
+Besides, the village on the river bank with a sunset behind is
+obviously a beautiful thing.... The mischief has been done, the
+irredeemable mischief has been achieved. Smith buys a Leader, and the
+Leader begets a Long, the Long begets a Fildes, the Fildes begets a
+Dicksee, the Dicksee begets a Herkomer.
+
+Such is the genesis of Mr. Smith's collection, and it is typical of a
+hundred now being formed in London. In ten years Mr. Smith has laid
+out forty or fifty thousand pounds. He asks his friends if they don't
+like his collection quite as well as Brown's: he urges that he can't
+see much difference himself. Nor is there much difference. The same
+articles--that is to say, identically similar articles--vulgarly
+painted sunsets, vulgarly painted doctors, vulgarly painted babies,
+vulgarly painted manor-houses with saddle-horses and a young lady
+hesitating on the steps, have been acquired at or about the same
+prices. The popular R.A.s have appealed to popular sentiment, and
+popular sentiment has responded; and the City has paid the price. But
+Time is not at all a sentimental person: he is quite unaffected by the
+Adelphi reality of the doctor's face or the mawkish treacle of the
+village church; and when the collection is sold at auction twenty
+years hence, it will fetch about a fourth of the price that was paid.
+
+Mr. Smith's artistic taste knows no change; it was formed on Mr.
+Brown's Leader, and developing logically from it, passing through
+Long, Fildes, and Dicksee, it touches high-water mark at Hook. The
+pretty blue sea and the brown fisher-folk call for popular admiration
+almost as imperatively as the sunset in the village churchyard; and
+when an artist--for in his adventures among dealers Mr. Smith met one
+or two--points out how much less like treacle Mr. Hook is than Mr.
+Leader, and how much more flowing and supple the drawing of the
+sea-shore is than the village seen against the sunset, Mr. Smith
+thinks he understands what is meant. But remembering the fifteen
+hundred pounds he paid for the cream sky and the treacle trees, he is
+quite sure that nothing could be better.
+
+The ordinary perception of the artistic value of a picture does not
+arise above Mr. Smith's. I have studied the artistic capacity of the
+ordinary mind long and diligently, and I know my analysis of it is
+exact; and if I do not exaggerate the artistic incapabilities of Mr.
+Smith, it must be admitted that the influence which his money permits
+him to exercise in the art world is an evil influence, and is
+exercised persistently to the very great detriment of the real artist.
+But it will be said that the moneyed man cannot be forbidden to buy
+the pictures that please him. No, but men should not be elected
+Academicians merely because their pictures are bought by City men, and
+this is just what is done. Do not think that Sir John Millais is
+unaware that Mr. Long's pictures, artistically considered, are quite
+worthless. Do not think that Mr. Orchardson does not turn in contempt
+from Mr. Leader's tea-trays. Do not think that every artist, however
+humble, however ignorant, does not know that Mr. Goodall's portrait of
+Mrs. Kettlewell stands quite beyond the range of criticism. Mr. Long,
+Mr. Leader, and Mr. Goodall were not elected Academicians because the
+Academicians who voted for them approved of their pictures, but
+because Mr. Smith and his like purchased their pictures; and by
+electing these painters to Academic honours the taste of Mr. Smith
+receives official confirmation.
+
+The public can distinguish very readily--far better than it gets
+credit for--between bad literature and good; nor is the public deaf to
+good music, but the public seems quite powerless to distinguish
+between good painting and bad. No, I am wrong; it distinguishes very
+well between bad painting and good, only it invariably prefers the
+bad. The language of speech we are always in progress of learning; and
+the language of music being similar to that of speech, it becomes
+easier to hear that Wagner is superior to Rossini than to see that
+Whistler is better than Leader. Of all languages none is so difficult,
+so varying, so complex, so evanescent, as that of paint; and yet it is
+precisely the works written in this language that every one believes
+himself able to understand, and ready to purchase at the expense of a
+large part of his fortune. If I could make such folk understand how
+illusory is their belief, what a service I should render to art--if I
+could only make them understand that the original taste of man is
+always for the obvious and the commonplace, and that it is only by
+great labour and care that man learns to understand as beautiful that
+which the uneducated eye considers ugly.
+
+Why will the art patron never take advice? I should seek it if I
+bought pictures. If Degas were to tell me that a picture I had
+intended to buy was not a good one I should not buy it, and if Degas
+were to praise a picture in which I could see no merit I should buy it
+and look at it until I did. Such confession will make me appear
+weak-minded to many; but this is so, because much instruction is
+necessary even to understand how infinitely more Degas knows than any
+one else can possibly know. The art patron never can understand as
+much about art as the artist, but he can learn a good deal. It is
+fifteen years since I went to Degas's studio for the first time. I
+looked at his portraits, at his marvellous ballet-girls, at the
+washerwomen, and understood nothing of what I saw. My blindness to
+Degas's merit alarmed me not a little, and I said to Manet--to whom I
+paid a visit in the course of the afternoon--"It is very odd, Manet, I
+understand your work, but for the life of me I cannot see the great
+merit you attribute to Degas." To hear that some one has not
+understood your rival's work as well as he understands your own is
+sweet flattery, and Manet only murmured under his breath that it was
+very odd, since there were astonishing things in Degas.
+
+Since those days I have learnt to understand Degas; but unfortunately
+I have not been able to transmit my knowledge to any one. When
+important pictures by Degas could be bought for a hundred and a
+hundred and fifty pounds apiece, I tried hard to persuade some City
+merchants to buy them. They only laughed and told me they liked Long
+better. Degas has gone up fifty per cent, Long has declined fifty per
+cent. Whistler's can be bought to-day for comparatively small prices;
+[Footnote: This was written before the Whistler boom.] in twenty years
+they will cost three times as much; in twenty years Mr. Leader's
+pictures will probably not be worth half as much as they are to-day.
+What I am saying is the merest commonplace, what every artist knows;
+but go to an art patron--a City merchant--and ask him to pay five
+hundred for a Degas, and he will laugh at you; he will say, "Why,
+I could get a Dicksee or a Leader for a thousand or two."
+
+
+
+
+PICTURE DEALERS.
+
+
+In the eighteenth century, and the centuries that preceded it, artists
+were visited by their patrons, who bought what the artist had to sell,
+and commissioned him to paint what he was pleased to paint. But in our
+time the artist is visited by a showily-dressed man, who comes into
+the studio whistling, his hat on the back of his head. This is the
+West-End dealer: he throws himself into an arm-chair, and if there is
+nothing on the easels that appeals to the uneducated eye, the dealer
+lectures the artist on his folly in not considering the exigencies of
+public taste. On public taste--that is to say, on the uneducated
+eye--the dealer is a very fine authority. His father was a dealer
+before him, and the son was brought up on prices, he lisped in prices,
+and was taught to reverence prices. He cannot see the pictures for
+prices, and he lies back, looking round distractedly, not listening to
+the timid, struggling artist who is foolishly venturing an
+explanation. Perhaps the public might come to his style of painting if
+he were to persevere. The dealer stares at the ceiling, and his lips
+recall his last evening at the music-hall. If the public don't like
+it--why, they don't like it, and the sooner the artist comes round the
+better. That is what he has to say on the subject, and, if sneers and
+sarcasm succeed in bringing the artist round to popular painting, the
+dealer buys; and when he begins to feel sure that the uneducated eye
+really hungers for the new man, he speaks about getting up a boom in
+the newspapers.
+
+The Press is in truth the great dupe; the unpaid jackal that goes into
+the highways and byways for the dealer! The stockbroker gets the
+Bouguereau, the Herkomer, the Alfred East, and the Dagnan-Bouveret
+that his soul sighs for; but the Press gets nothing except unreadable
+copy, and yet season after season the Press falls into the snare. It
+seems only necessary for a dealer to order an artist to frame the
+contents of his sketch-book, and to design an invitation card--"Scenes
+on the Coast of Denmark", sketches made by Mr. So-and-so during the
+months of June, July, and August--to secure half a column of a goodly
+number of London and provincial papers--to put it plainly, an
+advertisement that Reckitts or Pears or Beecham could not get for
+hundreds of pounds. One side of the invitation card is filled up with
+a specimen design, usually such a futile little thing as we might
+expect to find in a young lady's sketch-book: "Copenhagen at Low
+Tide", "Copenhagen at High Tide", "View of the Cathedral from the
+Mouth of the River", "The Hills of----as seen from off the Coast". And
+this topography every art critic will chronicle, and his chronicling
+will be printed free of charge amongst the leading columns of the
+paper. Nor is this the worst case. The request to notice a collection
+of paintings and drawings made by the late Mr. So-and-so seems even
+more flagrant, for then there is no question of benefiting a young
+artist who stands in need of encouragement or recognition; the show is
+simply a dealer's exhibition of his ware. True, that the ware may be
+so rare and excellent that it becomes a matter of public interest; if
+so, the critic is bound to notice the show. But the ordinary show--a
+collection of works by a tenth-rate French artist--why should the
+Press advertise such wares gratis? The public goes to theatres and to
+flower-shows and to race-courses, but it does not go to these dealers'
+shows--the dealer's friends and acquaintances go on private view day,
+and for the rest of the season the shop is quieter than the
+tobacconist's next door.
+
+For the last month every paper I took up contained glowing accounts of
+Messrs. Tooth & MacLean's galleries (picture dealers do not keep
+shops--they keep galleries), glowing accounts of a large and extensive
+assortment of Dagnan-Bouveret, Bouguereau, Rosa Bonheur: very nice
+things in their way, just such things as I would take Alderman
+Samuelson to see.
+
+These notices, taken out in the form of legitimate advertisement,
+would run into hundreds of pounds; and I am quite at a loss to
+understand why the Press abandons so large a part of its revenue. For
+if the Press did not notice these exhibitions, the dealers would be
+forced into the advertising columns, and when a little notice was
+published of the ware, it would be done as a little return--as a
+little encouragement for advertising, on the same principle as ladies'
+papers publish visits to dressmakers. The present system of noticing
+Messrs Tooth's and not noticing Messrs. Pears' is to me wholly
+illogical; and, to use the word which makes every British heart beat
+quicker--unbusinesslike. But with business I have nothing to do--my
+concern is with art; and if the noticing of dealers' shows were not
+inimical to art, I should not have a word to say against the practice.
+Messrs. Tooth & MacLean trade in Salon and Academy pictures, so the
+notices the Press prints are the equivalent of a subvention granted by
+the Press for the protection of this form of art. If I were a
+statistician, it would interest me to turn over the files of the
+newspapers for the last fifty years and calculate how much Messrs.
+Agnew have had out of the Press in the shape of free advertisement.
+And when we think what sort of art this vast sum of money went to
+support, we cease to wonder at the decline of public taste.
+
+My quarrel is no more with Messrs. Agnew than it is with Messrs. Tooth
+& MacLean; my quarrel--I should say, my reprimand--is addressed to the
+Press--to the Press that foolishly, unwittingly, not knowing what it
+was doing, threw such power into the hands of the dealers that our
+exhibitions are now little more than the tributaries of the Bond
+Street shop? This statement will shock many; but let them think, and
+they will see it could not be otherwise. Messrs. Agnew have thousands
+and thousands of pounds invested in the Academy--that is to say, in
+the works of Academicians. When they buy the work of any one outside
+of the Academy, they talk very naturally of their new man to their
+friends the Academicians, and the Academicians are anxious to please
+their best customer. It was in some such way that Mr. Burne-Jones's
+election was decided. For Mr. Burne-Jones was held in no Academic
+esteem. His early pictures had been refused at Burlington House, and
+he resolved never to send there again. For many years he remained firm
+in his determination. In the meantime the public showed unmistakable
+signs of accepting Mr. Jones, whereupon Messrs. Agnew also accepted
+Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was popular; he was better than popular, he stood
+on the verge of popularity; but there was nothing like making things
+safe--Jones's election to the Academy would do that. Jones's scruples
+would have to be overcome; he must exhibit once in the Academy. The
+Academicians would be satisfied with that. Mr. Jones did exhibit in
+the Academy; he was elected on the strength of this one exhibit. He
+has never exhibited since. These are the facts: confute them who may,
+explain them who can.
+
+It is true that the dealer cannot be got rid of--he is a vice inherent
+in our civilisation; but if the Press withdrew its subvention, his
+monopoly would be curtailed, and art would be recruited by new talent,
+at present submerged. Art would gradually withdraw from the bluster
+and boom of an arrogant commercialism, and would attain her olden
+dignity--that of a quiet handicraft. And in this great reformation
+only two classes would suffer--the art critics and the dealers. The
+newspaper proprietors would profit largely, and the readers of
+newspapers would profit still more largely, for they would no longer
+be bored by the publication of dealers' catalogues expanded with
+insignificant comment.
+
+
+
+
+MR. BURNE-JONES AND THE ACADEMY.
+
+
+    _To the Editor of "The Speaker"._
+
+    SIR,--Your art critic "G. M." is in error on a matter of fact,
+    and as everybody knows the relationship between fact and theory,
+    I am afraid his little error vitiates the argument he propounds
+    with so much vigour. It was _after_, and not before, his
+    election as an Associate that Mr. Burne-Jones made his solitary
+    appearance as an exhibitor at the Royal Academy.--Yours truly,
+    etc.,
+
+    R. I.
+
+    Sir,-It has always been my rule not to enter into argument with
+    my critics, but in the instance of "R. I." I find myself obliged
+    to break my rule. "R. I." thinks that the mistake I slipped into
+    regarding Mr. Burne-Jones's election as an Associate vitiates the
+    argument which he says I propound with vigour. I, on the contrary,
+    think that the fact that Mr. Burne-Jones was elected as an
+    Associate before he had exhibited in the Royal Academy advances
+    my argument. Being in doubt as to the particular fact, I
+    unconsciously imagined the general fact, and when man's imagination
+    intervenes it is always to soften, to attenuate crudities which
+    only nature is capable of.
+
+    For twenty years, possibly for more, Mr. Burne-Jones was a resolute
+    opponent of the Royal Academy, as resolute, though not so truculent,
+    an opponent as Mr. Whistler. When he became a popular painter Mr.
+    Agnew gave him a commission of fifteen thousand pounds--the largest,
+    I believe, ever given--to paint four pictures, the "Briar Rose"
+    series. Some time after--before he has exhibited in the Academy--Mr.
+    Jones is elected as an Associate. The Academicians cannot plead that
+    their eyes were suddenly opened to his genius. If this miracle had
+    happened they would not have left him an Associate, but would have
+    on the first vacancy elected him a full Academician. How often have
+    they passed him over? Is Mr. Jones the only instance of a man being
+    elected to the Academy who had never exhibited there? Perhaps "R. I."
+    will tell us. I do not know, and have not time to hunt up records.
+
+    G. M.
+
+
+
+
+THE ALDERMAN IN ART.
+
+
+Manchester and Liverpool are rival cities. They have matched
+themselves one against the other, and the prize they are striving for
+is--Which shall be the great art-centre of the North of England. The
+artistic rivalry of the two cities has become obvious of late years.
+Manchester bids against Liverpool, Liverpool bids against Manchester;
+the results of the bidding are discussed, and so an interest in art is
+created. It was Manchester that first threw her strength into this
+artistic rivalry. It began with the decorations which Manchester
+commissioned Mr. Madox Brown to paint for the town hall. Manchester's
+choice of an artist was an excellent and an original one. Mr. Madox
+Brown was not an Academician; he was not known to the general public;
+he merely commanded the respect of his brother-artists.
+
+The painting of these pictures was the work of years; the placing of
+every one was duly chronicled in the press, and it was understood in
+London that Manchester was entirely satisfied. But lo! on the placing
+in position of the last picture but one of the series an unseemly
+dispute was raised by some members of the Corporation, and it was
+seriously debated in committee whether the best course to pursue would
+not be to pass a coat of whitewash over the offending picture. It is
+impossible to comment adequately on such barbarous conduct; perhaps at
+no distant date it will be proposed to burn some part of Mrs. Ryland's
+perfect gift--the Althorp Library. There may be some books in that
+library which do not meet with some councillor's entire approval.
+Barbarism on one side, and princely generosity on the other, combined
+to fix attention upon Manchester, and, in common with a hundred
+others, I found myself thinking on the relation of Manchester and
+Liverpool to art, and speculating on the direction that these new
+influences were taking.
+
+There are two exhibitions now open in Manchester and Liverpool--the
+permanent and the annual. The permanent collections must first occupy
+our attention, for it is through them that we shall learn what sort
+and kind of artistic taste obtains in the North. At first sight these
+collections present no trace of any distinct influence. They seem to
+be simply miscellaneous purchases, made from every artist whose name
+happens to be the fashion; and considered as permanent illustrations
+of the various fashions that have prevailed in Bond Street during the
+last ten years, these collections are curious and perhaps valuable
+documents in the history of art. But is there any real analogy between
+a dressmaker's shop and a picture gallery? Plumes are bought because
+they are "very much worn just now", but then plumes are not so
+expensive as pictures, and it seems to be hardly worth while to buy
+pictures for the sake of the momentary fashion in painting which they
+represent.
+
+Manchester and Liverpool have not, however, grasped the essential fact
+that it is impossible to form an art gallery by sending to London for
+the latest fashions. Now and then the advice of some gentleman knowing
+more about art than his colleagues has found expression in the
+purchase of a work of art; but the picture that hangs next to the
+fortuitous purchase tells how the taste of the cultured individual was
+overruled by the taste of the uncultured mass at the next meeting. I
+could give many, but two instances must suffice to explain and to
+prove my point. Two years ago Mr. Albert Moore exhibited a very
+beautiful picture in the Academy--three women, one sleeping and two
+sitting on a yellow couch, in front of a starlit and moonlit sea. In
+the same Academy there was exhibited a picture by Mr. Bartlett--a
+picture of some gondoliers rowing or punting or sculling (I am
+ignorant of the aquatic habits of the Venetians) for a prize. The
+Liverpool Gallery has bought and hung these pictures side by side.
+Such divagations of taste make the visitor smile, and he thinks
+perforce of the accounts of the stormy meetings of councillors that
+find their way into the papers. Artistic appreciation of these two
+pictures in the same individual is not possible. What should we think
+of a man who said that he did not know which he preferred-a poem by
+Tennyson, or a story out of the _London Journal_? Catholicity of taste
+does not mean an absolute abandonment of all discrimination; and some
+thread of intellectual kinship must run through the many various
+manifestations of artistic temperament which go to form a collection
+of pictures. Things may be various without being discrepant.
+
+The Manchester Gallery has purchased Lawson's beautiful picture, "The
+Deserted Garden"; likewise Mr. Fildes' picture of a group of Venetian
+girls sitting on steps, the principal figure in a blue dress with an
+orange handkerchief round her neck, the simple--I may say
+child-like--scheme of colour beyond which Mr. Fildes never seems to
+stray. The Lawson and the Fildes agree no better than do the Moore and
+the Bartlett; and the only thing that occurs to me is that the cities
+should toss up which should go for Fildes and Bartlett, and which for
+Lawson and Moore. By such division harmony would be attained, and one
+city would be going the wrong road, the other the right road; at
+present both are going zigzag.
+
+But notwithstanding the multifarious tastes displayed in these
+collections, and the artistic chaos they represent, we can, when we
+examine them closely, detect an influence which abides though it
+fluctuates, and this influence is that of our discredited Academy. The
+Manchester and Liverpool collection are merely weak reflections of the
+Chantrey Fund collection. Now, if the object of these cities be to
+adopt the standard of taste that obtains in Burlington House, to
+abdicate their own taste--if they have any--and to fortify themselves
+against all chance of acquiring a taste in art, it would clearly be
+better for the two corporations to hand over the task of acquiring
+pictures to the Academicians. The responsibility will be gladly
+accepted, and the trust will be administered with the same honesty and
+straightforwardness as has been displayed in the administration of the
+moneys which the unfortunate Chantrey entrusted to the care of the
+Academicians.
+
+The sowing of evil seed is an irreparable evil; none can tell where
+the wind will carry it, and unexpected crops are found far and wide. I
+had thought that the harm occasioned to art by the Academy and its
+corollary, the Chantrey Fund, began and ended in London. But in
+Manchester and Liverpool I was speedily convinced of my mistake. Art
+in the provinces is little more than a reflection of the Academy. The
+majority of the pictures represent the taste of men who have no
+knowledge of art, and who, to disguise their ignorance, follow the
+advice which the Academy gives to provincial England in the pictures
+it purchases under the terms--or, rather, under its own reading of the
+terms--of the Chantrey Bequest Fund. One of the first things I heard
+in Manchester was that the committee had been fortunate enough to
+secure the nude figure which Mr. Hacker exhibited this year in the
+Academy. And on my failing to express unbounded admiration for the
+purchase, I was asked if I was aware that the Academy had purchased
+"The Annunciation" for the Chantrey Bequest Fund. "Surely," said a
+member of the committee, "you agree that our picture is the better of
+the two." I answered: "Poor Mr. Chantrey's money always goes to buy
+the worst, or as nearly as possible the worst, picture the artist ever
+painted--the picture for which the artist would never be likely to
+find a purchaser."
+
+Last month the Liverpool County Council assembled to discuss the
+purchase of two pictures recommended by the art committee--"Summer",
+by Mr. Hornel; and "The Higher Alps", by Mr. Stott, of Oldham. The
+discussion that ensued is described by the _Liverpool Daily Post_ as
+"amusing". It was ludicrous, and those who do not care a snap of the
+fingers about art might think it amusing. The joke was started by Mr.
+Lynskey, who declared that the two pictures in question were mere
+daubs. Mr. Lynskey did not think that the Glasgow school of painting
+had yet been recognised by the public, and until it had he did not see
+why the corporation should pay £500 for these two productions, merely
+for the sake of experimenting. Thereby we are to understand that in
+forming a collection of pictures it is the taste of the public that
+must be considered. "Of course," cry the aldermen; "we are here to
+supply the public with what it wants." I repeat, the corporations of
+Manchester and Liverpool do not seem to have yet grasped the fact that
+there is no real analogy between a picture gallery and a dressmaker's
+shop.
+
+The next speaker was Mr. Burgess. He could not imagine how any one
+could recommend the purchase of such pictures. The Mr. Burgesses of
+twenty-five years ago could not understand how any one could buy
+Corots. Mr. Smith asked if it were really a fact that the committee
+had bought the pictures. He was assured that they would be bought only
+if the council approved of them; whereupon Alderman Samuelson declared
+that if that were so they would not be bought. Dr. Cummins compared
+the pictures to cattle in the parish pound, and it is reported that
+the remark caused much laughter. Then some one said--I think it was
+Mr. Smith--that the pictures had horrified him; whereupon there was
+more laughter. Then a member proposed that they should have the
+pictures brought in, to which proposition a member objected, amid much
+laughter. Then Mr. Daughan suggested that the chairman and
+vice-chairman should explain the meaning of the pictures to the
+council. More laughter and more County Council humour. The meeting was
+a typical meeting, and it furnishes us with the typical councillor.
+
+In the report of the meeting before me a certain alderman seems to
+have been as garrulous as he was irrepressible. He not only spoke at
+greater length than the rest of the councillors put together, but did
+not hesitate to frequently interrupt the members of the committee with
+remarks. Speaking of pictures by Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti,
+he said:--"We have had exhibitions, and the works of these great
+artists were at various times closely scrutinised, and they had borne
+the most careful scrutiny that could be directed to them. Now I defy
+you to take a number of pictures such as those in dispute, and do the
+same with them." No one could have spoken the words I have quoted who
+was not absolutely ignorant of the art of painting. Imagine the poor
+alderman going round, magnifying-glass in hand, subjecting Millais and
+Holman Hunt to the closest scrutiny. And how easy it is to determine
+what was passing in his mind during the examination of the Glasgow
+school! "I can't see where this foot finishes; the painter was not
+able to draw it, so he covered it up with a shadow. In the pictures of
+that fellow Guthrie the grass is merely a tint of green, whereas in
+the 'Shadow of the Cross' I can count all the shavings."
+
+But we will not seek to penetrate further into this very alderman-like
+mind. He declared that the Glasgow school of painting was "no more in
+comparison to what they recognised as a school of painting than a
+charity school was to the University of Oxford." I am sorry our
+alderman did not say what was the school of painting that he and his
+fellow-aldermen admired. In the absence of any precise information on
+the point I will venture to suggest that the school they recognise is
+the school of Bartlett and Solomon. The gallery possesses two large
+works by these masters--the Gondoliers, and the great picture of
+Samson, which fills an entire end of one room. But what would be of
+still greater interest would be to hear our alderman explain what he
+meant by this astonishing sentence:--"The only motive of Mr. Hornel's
+picture is a mode of art or rather artifice, in introducing a number
+of colours with the idea of making them harmonise; and this could be
+done, and had been done, by means of the palette-knife."
+
+I have not the least idea what this means, but I am none the less
+interested. For, although void of sense, the alderman's words allow me
+to look down a long line of illustrious ancestry--Prud'homme,
+Chadband, Stiggins, Phillion, the apothecary Homais in "Madame
+Bovary". After passing through numerous transformations, an eternal
+idea at last incarnates itself in a final form. How splendid our
+alderman is! Never did a corporation produce so fine a flower. He is
+sententious, he is artistic. And how he lets fall from his thick lips
+those scraps of art-jargon which he picked up in the studio where he
+sat for his portrait! He is moral; he thinks that nude figures should
+not be sanctioned by the corporation; he believes in the Bank, and
+proposes the Queen's health as if he were fulfilling an important
+duty; he goes to the Academy, and dictates the aestheticism of his
+native town. There he is, his hand in his white waistcoat, in the pose
+chosen for the presentation portrait, at the moment when he delivered
+himself of his famous apophthegm, "When the nude comes into art, art
+flies out of the window."
+
+The alderman is the reef which for the last five-and-twenty years has
+done so much to ruin and to wreck every artistic movement which the
+enthusiasm and intelligence of individuals have set on foot. The mere
+checking of the obstruction of the individual will not suffice; other
+aldermen will arise--equally ignorant, equally talkative, equally
+obstructive. And until the race is relegated to its proper function,
+bimetallism and sewage, the incidents I have described will happen
+again and again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A marvellous accident that it should have come to be believed that a
+corporation could edit a picture gallery! Whence did the belief
+originate? whence did it spring? and in what fancied substance of fact
+did it catch root? A tapeworm-like notion--come we know not whence,
+nor how. And it has thriven unobserved, though signs of its presence
+stare plainly enough in the pallid face of the wretched gallery.
+Curious it is that it should have remained undetected so long;
+curious, indeed, it is that straying thought should have led no one to
+remember that every great art collection of the world has grown out of
+an individual intelligence. Collections have been worthily continued,
+but each successive growth has risen in obedience to the will of one
+supreme authority; and that it should have ever come to be believed
+that twenty aldermen, whose lives are mainly spent in considering
+bank-rates, bimetallism, and sewage, could collect pictures of
+permanent value is on the face of it as wild a folly as ever tried the
+strength of the strait waistcoats of Hanwell or Bedlam. But as
+Manchester and Liverpool enjoy as fair a measure of sanity as the rest
+of the kingdom, we perforce must admit the theory of unconscious
+acceptation of a chance idea.
+
+But I take it that what is essential in my argument is not to prove
+that aldermen know little about art, but that twenty men, wise or
+foolish, ignorant or learned, cannot edit a picture gallery. Proving
+the obvious is not an amusing task, but it is sometimes a necessary
+task. It may be thought, too, that I might be more brief; the elderly
+maxim about brevity being the soul of wit may be flung in my teeth.
+But lengthy discourse gives time for reflection, and I am seriously
+anxious that my readers should consider the question which these
+articles introduce. I believe it to be one of vital interest, reaching
+down a long range of consequences; and should these articles induce
+Manchester and Liverpool to place their galleries in the care of
+competent art-directors, I shall have rendered an incalculable service
+to English art. I say "competent art-directors", and I mean by
+"competent art-directors" men who will deem their mission to be a
+repudiation of the Anglo-French art fostered by the Academy--a return
+to a truer English tradition, and the giving to Manchester and
+Liverpool individual artistic aspiration and tendency.
+
+Is the ambition of Manchester and Liverpool limited to paltry
+imitations of the Chantrey Fund collection? If they desire no more, it
+would serve no purpose to disturb the corporations in their management
+of the galleries. The corporations can do this better than any
+director. But if Manchester and Liverpool desire individual artistic
+life, if they wish to collect art that will attract visitors and
+contribute to their renown, they can only do this by the appointment
+of competent directors. For assurance on this point we have only to
+think what Sir Frederick Burton has done for the National Gallery, or
+what the late Mr. Doyle did for Dublin on the meagre grant of one
+thousand a year. It is the man and not the amount of money spent that
+counts. A born collector like the late Mr. Doyle can do more with a
+thousand a year than a corporation could do with a hundred thousand a
+year.
+
+Nothing is of worth except individual passion; it is the one thing
+that achieves. And I know of no more intense passion--and, I will add,
+no more beautiful passion--than the passion for collecting works of
+art. Of all passions it is the purest. It matters little to the man
+possessed of it whether he collects for the State or for himself. The
+gallery is his child, and all his time and energy are given to the
+enrichment and service of _his_ gallery. The gallery is his one
+thought. He will lie awake at night to better think out his plans for
+the capture of some treasure on which he has set his heart. He will
+get up in the middle of the night, and walk about the gallery,
+considering some project for improved arrangements. To realise the
+meaning of the passion for collecting, it is necessary to have known a
+real collector, and intimately, for collectors do not wear their
+hearts on their sleeve. With the indifferent they are indifferent; but
+they are quick to detect the one man or woman who sympathises, who
+understands; and they select with eagerness this one from the crowd.
+But perhaps the collector never really reveals himself except to a
+fellow-collector, and to appreciate the strength and humanity of the
+passion it is necessary to have seen Duret and Goncourt explaining a
+new Japanesery which one of them has just acquired.
+
+The partial love which a corporation may feel for its collection is
+very different from the undivided strength of the collector's love of
+his gallery. And even if we were to admit the possibility of an ideal
+corporation consisting of men perfectly conversant with art, and
+animated with passion equal to the collector's passion, the history of
+its labour would still be written in the words "vexatious discussion
+and lost chances". The rule that no picture is to be purchased until
+it has been seen and approved of by the corporation forbids all
+extraordinary chances, and the unique and only moment is lost in
+foolish formulae. The machinery is too cumbersome; and chances of
+sale-rooms cannot be seized; it is instinct and not reason that
+decides the collector, and no dozen or twenty men can ever be got to
+immediately agree.
+
+Not long after my article on Manet was published in the columns of the
+_Speaker_, a member of the Manchester art committee wrote asking where
+could the pictures be seen, and if the owners would lend them for
+exhibition in the annual exhibition soon to open. If they did, perhaps
+the corporation might be induced to buy them for the permanent
+collection. Now I will ask my readers to imagine my bringing the
+pictures "Le Linge" and "L'Enfant à l'Êpée" over from France, and
+submitting them to the judgment of the Manchester Corporation. As well
+might I submit to them a Velasquez or a Gainsborough signed Smith and
+Jones! It is the authority of the signature that induces acquiescence
+in the beauty of a portrait by Gainsborough or Velasquez; without the
+signature the ordinary or drawing-room lady would prefer a portrait by
+Mr. Shannon. Mr. Shannon is the fashion, and the fashion, being the
+essence and soul of the crowd, is naturally popular with the crowd.
+
+In my article on Manet I referred to a beautiful picture of
+his--"Boulogne Pier". It was then on exhibition in Bond Street. I
+asked a friend to buy it. "You will not like the picture now," I said;
+"but if you have any latent aesthetic feeling in you it will bring it
+out, and you will like it in six months' time." My friend would not
+buy the picture, and the reason he gave was that he did not like it.
+It did not seem to occur to him that his taste might advance, and that
+the picture he was ignorant enough to like to-day he might be wise
+enough to loathe six years hence.
+
+An early customer of Sir John Millais said, "Millais, I'll give you
+five hundred pounds to paint me a picture, and you shall paint me the
+picture you are minded to paint." Sir John painted him one of the most
+beautiful pictures of modern times, "St. Agnes' Eve". But the wisdom
+of the purchaser was only temporary. When the picture came home he did
+not like it, his wife did not like it; there was no colour in it; it
+was all blue and green. Briefly, it was not a pleasant picture to live
+with; and after trying the experiment for a few months this excellent
+gentleman decided to exchange the picture for a picture by--by
+whom?--by Mr. Sidney Cooper. I wonder what he thinks of himself
+to-day. And his fate is the fate of the aldermen who buy pictures
+because they like them.
+
+The administration of art, as it was pointed out in the _Manchester
+Guardian_, is one of extreme difficulty, and it is not easy to find a
+competent director; but it seems to me to be easy to name many men who
+would do better in art-management than a corporation, and
+embarrassingly difficult to name one who would do worse. Any one man
+can thread a needle better than twenty men. Should the needle prove
+brittle and the thread rotten, the threader must resign. Though a task
+may be accomplished only by one man, and though all differ as to how
+it should be accomplished, yet, when the task is well accomplished, an
+appreciative unanimity seems to prevail regarding the result. We all
+agree in praising Sir Frederick Burton's administration; and yet how
+easy it would be to cavil! Why has he not bought an Ingres, a Corot, a
+Courbet, a Troyon? Why has he showed such excessive partiality for
+squint-eyed Italian saints? Sir Frederick Burton would answer: "In
+collecting, like in everything else, you must choose a line. I chose
+to consider the National Gallery as a museum. The question is whether
+I have collected well or badly from this point of view." But a
+corporation cannot choose a line on which to collect; it can do no
+more than indulge in miscellaneous purchases.
+
+
+
+
+RELIGIOSITY IN ART.
+
+
+One Sunday morning, more than twenty years ago, I breakfasted with a
+great painter, who was likewise a wit, and the account he gave of a
+recent visit to the Doré Gallery amused me very much. On entering, he
+noticed that next to the door there was a high desk, so cunningly
+constructed both as regards height and inclination that all the
+discomforts of writing were removed; and the brightness of the silver
+inkpot, the arrangement of the numerous pens and the order-book on the
+desk, all was so perfect that the fingers of the lettered and
+unlettered itched alike with desire of the caligraphic art. By this
+desk loitered a large man of bland and commanding presence. He wore a
+white waistcoat, and a massive gold chain, with which he toyed while
+watching the guileless spectators or sought with soothing voice to
+entice one to display his handwriting in the order-book. My friend,
+who was small and thin, almost succeeded in defeating the vigilance of
+the white-waistcoated and honey-voiced Cerberus; but at the last
+moment, as he was about to slip out, he was stopped, and the following
+dialogue ensued:--
+
+"Sir, that is a very great picture."
+
+"Yes, it is indeed, it is an immense picture."
+
+"Sir, I mean great in every sense of the word."
+
+"So do I; it is nearly as broad as it is long."
+
+"I was alluding, sir, to the superior excellence of the picture, and
+not to its dimensions."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"May I ask, sir, if you know what that picture represents?"
+
+"I'm sorry, but I can't tell you."
+
+"Then, sir, I'll tell you. That picture represents the point of
+culmination in the life of Christ."
+
+"Really; may I ask who says so?"
+
+"The dignitaries of the Church say so."
+
+Pause, during which my friend made an ineffectual attempt to get past.
+The waistcoat, however, barred the way, and then the bland and dulcet
+voice spoke again.
+
+"Do you see that man copying the right-hand corner of the picture?
+That gentleman says that the man who could paint that corner could
+paint anything."
+
+"Oh! and who is that gentleman?"
+
+"That gentleman is employed to copy in the National Gallery."
+
+"Oh! by the State?"
+
+"No, sir, not by the State, but he has permission to copy in the
+National Gallery."
+
+"A special permission granted to him by the State?"
+
+"No, sir, but he has permission to copy in the National Gallery." "In
+fact, just as every one else has. I am really very much obliged, but I
+must be getting along."
+
+"Sir, won't you put down your name for a ten-guinea proof signed by
+the artist?"
+
+"I'm very sorry, but I really do not see my way to taking a ten-guinea
+subscription."
+
+"Then, perhaps, you will take one at five--the same without the
+signature?"
+
+"I really cannot."
+
+"You can have a numbered proof for £2, 10s."
+
+"No, thank you; you must excuse me."
+
+"You can have an ordinary proof for a guinea."
+
+"No, thank you; you must really allow me to pass."
+
+Then in the last moment the white waistcoat, assuming a tone in which
+there was both despair and disdain, said--"But you will have a year
+and a half before you need pay your guinea."
+
+Who does not know this man? Who has not suffered from his
+importunities? Twenty years ago he extolled the beauties of "Christ
+leaving the Praetorium"; ten years later he lauded the merits of
+"Christ and Diana"; to-day he is busy advising the shilling public
+thronging the Dowdeswell galleries to view Mr. Herbert Schmalz's
+_impressive_ picture of "The Return from Calvary". I do not mean that
+the same gentleman who presided at the desk in the Doré Gallery now
+presides at the desk at 160 New Bond Street. The individual differs,
+but the type remains unaltered. The waistcoat, the desk, the pens and
+the silver inkstand, such paraphernalia are as inseparable from him as
+the hammer is from the auctioneer. All this I have on the authority of
+Messrs. Dowdeswell themselves. When engaging their canvasser, they
+offered him a small table at the end of the room. Their ignorance of
+his art caused him to smile. "A table," he said, "would necessitate
+sitting down to write, and the great point in this business is to save
+the customer from all unnecessary trouble. Any other place in the room
+except next the door is out of the question. I must have a nice desk
+there, at which you can write standing up, a lamp shedding a bright
+glow upon the paper, a handsome silver inkstand, and a long,
+evenly-balanced pen. Give me these things, and leave the rest to me."
+
+Messrs. Dowdeswell hastened to comply with these requests. I was in
+the gallery on Monday, and can testify to the pleasantness of the
+little installation, to the dexterity with which customers were led
+there, and to the grace with which the canvasser dipped the pen in the
+handsome silver inkstand. The county squire, the owner of racehorses,
+the undergraduate, and the Brixton spinster, are easily led by him to
+the commodious desk. Go and see the man, and you will be led thither
+likewise.
+
+It is a matter for wonder that more artists do not devote themselves
+to painting religious subjects. There seems to be an almost limitless
+demand for work of this kind, and almost any amount of praise for it,
+no matter how badly it is executed. The critic dares not turn the
+picture into ridicule however bad it may be, for to do so would seem
+like turning a sacred subject into ridicule--so few distinguish
+between the subject and the picture. He may hardly venture to
+depreciate the work, for it would not seem quite right to depreciate
+the work of a man who had endeavoured to depict, however inadequately,
+a sacred subject. Everything is in favour of the painter of religious
+subjects, provided certain formalities are observed. The canvasser and
+the arrangements of the desk are of course the first consideration,
+but there are a number of minor observances, not one of which may be
+neglected. The gallery must be thrown into deep twilight with a vivid
+light from above falling full on the picture. There must be lines of
+chairs, arranged as if for a devout congregation; and if, in excess of
+these, the primary conditions of success, one of the dignitaries of
+the Church can be induced to accept a little excursion into the
+perilous fields of art criticism, all will go well with the show.
+
+It would be unseemly for a critic to argue with a bishop concerning
+the merits of a religious picture--it would be irreverent, anomalous,
+and in execrable taste. For it must be clear to every one that the
+best and truest critic of a religious picture is a bishop; and it is
+still more clear that if the picture contains a view of Jerusalem, the
+one person who can speak authoritatively on the matter is the Bishop
+of Jerusalem. And it were indeed impossible to realise the essential
+nature of these truths better than Messrs. Dowdeswell have done; they
+have even ventured to extend the ordinary programme, and have decreed
+a special _matinée_ in the interests of country parsons--truly an idea
+of genius. If a fault may be found or forged with the arrangements, it
+is that they did not enter into some contract with the railway
+authorities. But this is hypercriticism; they have done their work
+well, and the _matinée_, as the order-book will testify, was a
+splendid success. The parsons came up from every part of the country,
+and as "The Return from Calvary" is the latest thing in religious art,
+they think themselves bound to put their names down for proofs. How
+could they refuse? The canvasser dipped the pen in the ink for them,
+and he has a knack of making a refusal seem so mean.
+
+About Mr. Schmalz's picture I have really no particular opinion. I do
+not think it worse than any picture of the same kind by the late Mr.
+Long. Nor do I think that it can be said to be very much inferior to
+the religious works with which Mr. Goodall has achieved so wide a
+reputation. On the whole I think I prefer Mr. Goodall, though I am not
+certain. Here is the picture:--At the top of a flight of steps and
+about two-thirds of the way across the picture, to the left, so as not
+to interfere with the view of Jerusalem, are three figures--as Sir
+Augustus Harris might have set them were he attempting a theatrical
+representation of the scene. There is a dark man, this is St. John,
+and over him a woman draped in white is weeping, and behind her a
+woman with golden hair--the Magdalen--is likewise weeping. Two other
+figures are ascending the steps, but as they are low down in the
+picture they interfere hardly at all with the splendid view. The dark
+sky is streaked with Naples yellow, and the pale colour serves to
+render distinct the three crosses planted upon Calvary in the extreme
+distance.
+
+In this world all is a question of temperament. To the aesthetic
+temperament Mr. Schmalz's picture will seem hardly more beautiful or
+attractive than a Salvationist hymn-book; the unaesthetic temperament
+will, on the other hand, be profoundly moved, the subject stands out
+clear and distinct, and that class of mind, overlooking all artistic
+shortcomings, will lose itself in emotional consideration of the
+grandest of all the world's tragedies. That Mr. Schmalz's picture is
+capable of exercising a profound effect on the uneducated mind there
+can be no doubt. While I was there a lady walked with stately tread
+into the next room, and seeing there nothing more exciting than rural
+scenes drawn in water-colour, exclaimed, "Trees, mere trees! what are
+trees after having had one's soul elevated?"
+
+That great artist Henri Monnier devoted a long life to the study and
+the collection of the finest examples of human stupidity, and
+marvellous as are some of the specimens preserved by him in his
+dialogues, I hardly think that he succeeded in discovering a finer gem
+than the phrase overheard by me in the Dowdeswell Galleries. To
+appreciate the sublime height, must we not know something of the
+miserable depth? And the study of human stupidity is refreshing and
+salutary; it helps us to understand ourselves, to estimate ourselves,
+and to force ourselves to look below the surface, and so raise our
+ideas out of that mire of casual thought in which we are all too prone
+to lie. For perfect culture, the lady I met at the Dowdeswell
+Galleries is as necessary as Shakespeare. Is she not equally an
+exhortation to be wise?
+
+
+
+
+THE CAMERA IN ART.
+
+
+It is certain that the introduction of Japaneseries into this country
+has permanently increased our sense of colour; is it therefore
+improbable that the invention of photography has modified, if it has
+not occasioned any very definite alteration in our general perception
+of the external world? It would be interesting to inquire into such
+recondite and illusive phenomena; and I am surprised that no paper on
+so interesting a question has appeared in any of our art journals.
+True, so many papers are printed in our weekly and monthly press that
+it is impossible for any one to know all that has been written on any
+one subject; but, so far as I am aware, no such paper has appeared,
+and the absence of such a paper is, I think, a serious deficiency in
+our critical literature.
+
+It is, however, no part of my present purpose to attempt to supply
+this want. I pass on to consider rapidly a matter less abstruse and of
+more practical interest, a growing habit among artists to avail
+themselves of the assistance of photographs in their work. It will not
+be questioned that many artists of repute do use photographs to--well,
+to put it briefly, to save themselves trouble, expense, and, in some
+cases, to supplant defective education. But the influence of
+photography on art is so vast a subject, so multiple, so intricate,
+that I may do no more here than lift the very outer fringe.
+
+It is, however, clear to almost everybody who has thought about art at
+all, that the ever-changing colour and form of clouds, the complex
+variety (definite in its very indefiniteness) of every populous
+street, the evanescent delicacy of line and aërial effect that the
+most common and prosaic suburb presents in certain lights, are the
+very enchantment and despair of the artist; and likewise every one who
+has for any short while reflected seriously on the problem of artistic
+work must know that the success of every evocative rendering of the
+exquisite externality of crowded or empty street, of tumult or calm in
+cloud-land, is the fruit of daily and hourly observation--observation
+filtered through years of thought, and then fortified again in
+observation of Nature.
+
+But such observation is the labour of a life; and he who undertakes it
+must be prepared to see his skin brown and blister in the shine, and
+feel his flesh pain him with icy chills in the biting north wind. The
+great landscape painters suffered for the intolerable desire of Art;
+they were content to forego the life of drawing-rooms and clubs, and
+live solitary lives in unceasing communion with Art and Nature. But
+artists in these days are afraid of catching cold, and impatient of
+long and protracted studentship. Everything must be made easy,
+comfortable, and expeditious; and so it comes to pass that many an
+artist seeks assistance from the camera. A moment, and it is done: no
+wet feet; no tiresome sojourn in the country when town is full of
+merry festivities; and, above all, hardly any failure--that is to say,
+no failure that the ordinary public can detect, nor, indeed, any
+failure that the artist's conscience will not get used to in time.
+
+Mr. Gregory is the most celebrated artist who is said to make habitual
+use of photography. Mr. Gregory has no warmer admirer than myself. His
+picture of "Dawn" is the most fairly famous picture of our time. But
+since that picture his art has declined. It has lost all the noble
+synthetical life which comes of long observation and gradual
+assimilation of Nature. His picture of a yachtsman in this year's
+Academy was as paltry, as "realistic" as may be.
+
+Professor Herkomer is another well-known artist who is said to use
+photography. It is even said that he has his sitter photographed on to
+the canvas, and the photographic foundation he then covers up with
+those dreadful browns and ochres which seem to constitute his palette.
+Report credits him with this method, which it is possible he believes
+to be an advance on the laborious process of drawing from Nature, to
+which, in the absence of the ingenious instrument, the Old Masters
+were perforce obliged to resort. It will be said that what matter how
+the artists work--that it is with the result, not the method, with
+which we are concerned. Dismissing report from our ears, surely we
+must recognise all the cheap realism of the camera in Professor
+Herkomer's portraits; and this is certainly their characteristic,
+although photography may have had nothing to do with their
+manufacture.
+
+Mr. Bartlett is another artist who, it is said, makes habitual use of
+photographs; and surely in some of his boys bathing the photographic
+effects are visible enough. But although very far from possessing the
+accomplishments of Mr. Gregory, Mr. Bartlett has acquired some
+education, and can draw, when occasion requires, very well indeed from
+life.
+
+Mr. Mortimer Menpes is the third artist of any notoriety that rumour
+has declared to be a disciple of the camera. His case is the most
+flagrant, for it is said that he rarely, if ever, draws from Nature,
+and that his entire work is done from photographs. Be this as it may,
+his friends have stated a hundred times in the Press that he uses
+photography, and it would seem that his work shows the mechanical aid
+more and more every day. Some years ago he went to Japan, and brought
+home a number of pictures which suited drawing-rooms, and were soon
+sold. I did not see the exhibition, but I saw some pictures done by
+him at that time--one, an especially good one, I happened upon in the
+Grosvenor Gallery. This picture, although superficial and betraying
+when you looked into it a radical want of knowledge, was not lacking
+in charm. In French studios there is a slang phrase which expresses
+the meretricious charm of this picture--_c'est du chic_; and the
+meaning of this very expressive term is ignorance affecting airs of
+capacity. Now the whole of Mr. Menpes' picture was comprised in this
+term. The manner of the master who, certain of the shape and value of
+the shadow under an eye, will let his hand run, was reproduced; but
+the exact shape and value of the shadows were not to be gathered from
+the photograph, and the result was a charming but a hollow mockery.
+
+And then the "colour-notes"; with what assurance they were dashed into
+the little pictures from Japan, and how dexterously the touch of the
+master who knows exactly what he wants was parodied! At the first
+glance you were deceived; at the second you saw that it was only such
+cursive taste and knowledge as a skilful photographer who had been
+allowed the run of a painter's studio for a few months might display.
+Nowhere was there any definite intention; it was something that had
+been well committed to memory, that had been well remembered, but only
+half-understood. Everything floated--drawing, values, colours--for
+there was not sufficient knowledge to hold and determine the place of
+any one.
+
+Since those days Mr. Menpes has continued to draw from photographs,
+and--the base of his artistic education being deficient from the
+first--the result of his long abstention from Nature is apparent, even
+to the least critical, in the some hundred and seventy paintings,
+etchings, and what he calls diamond-points on ivory, on exhibition at
+Messrs. Dowdeswell's. Diamond-points on ivory may astonish the
+unthinking public, but artists are interested in the drawing, and not
+what the drawing is done upon. Besides the diamond-points, there is
+quite sufficient matter in this exhibition to astonish visitors from
+Peckham, Pentonville, Islington, and perhaps Clapham, but not
+Bayswater--no, not Bayswater. There are frames in every sort of
+pattern--some are even adorned with gold tassels--and the walls have
+been especially prepared to receive them.
+
+These pictures and etchings purport to be representations of India,
+Burma, and Cashmire. The diamond-points, I believe, purport to be
+diamond-points. In some of the etchings there is the same ingenious
+touch of hand, but anything more woful than the oil pictures cannot
+easily be imagined. In truth, they do not call for any serious
+criticism; and were it not for the fact that they afforded an
+opportunity of making some remarks--which seemed to me to be worth
+making--about the influence of photography in modern art, I should
+have left the public to find for itself the value of this attempt, in
+the grandiloquent words of the catalogue, "to bring before my
+countrymen the aesthetic and artistic capabilities, and the beauty in
+various forms, that are to be found in our great Indian Empire." To
+criticise the pictures in detail is impossible; but I will try to give
+an impression of the exhibition as a whole. Imagine a room hung with
+ordinary school slates, imagine that all these slates have been gilt,
+and that some have been adorned with gold tassels instead of the usual
+sponge, and into each let there be introduced a dome, a camel, a
+palm-tree, or any other conventional sign of the East.
+
+On examining the paintings thus sumptuously encased you will notice
+that the painter has not been able to affect with the brush any slight
+air of capacity; the material betrays him at every point The etchings
+are _du chic_; but the paintings are merely abortive. The handling
+consists in scrubbing the colour into the canvas, attaining in this
+manner a texture which sometimes reminds you of wool, sometimes of
+sand, sometimes of both. The poor little bits of blue sky stick to the
+houses; there is nowhere a breath of air, a ray of light, not even a
+conventionally graduated sky or distance; there is not an angle, or a
+pillar, or a stairway finely observed; there is not even any such
+eagerness in the delineation of an object as would show that the
+painter felt interest in his work; every sketch tells the tale of a
+burden taken up and thankfully relinquished. Here we have white wall,
+but it has neither depth nor consistency; behind it a bit of sandy
+sky; the ground is yellow, and there is a violet shadow upon it. But
+the colour of the ground does not show through the shadow. Look, for
+example, at No. 36. Is it possible to believe that that red-brick sky
+was painted from Nature, or that unhappy palm in a picture close by
+was copied as it raised its head over that wall? The real scene would
+have stirred an emotion in the heart of the dullest member of the
+Stock Exchange, and, however unskilful the brushwork, if the man could
+hold a brush at all, there would have been something to show that the
+man had been in the presence of Nature. There is no art so indiscreet
+as painting, and the story of the painter's mind may be read in every
+picture.
+
+But another word regarding these pictures would be waste of space and
+time. Let Mr. Menpes put away his camera, let him go out into the
+streets or the fields, and there let him lose himself in the vastness
+and beauty of Nature. Let him study humbly the hang of a branch or the
+surface of a wall, striving to give to each their character. Let him
+try to render the mystery of a perspective in the blue evening or its
+harshness and violence in the early dawn. There is no need to go to
+Burma, there is mystery and poetry wherever there is atmosphere. In
+certain moments a backyard, with its pump and a child leaning to
+drink, will furnish sufficient motive for an exquisite picture; the
+atmosphere of the evening hour will endow it with melancholy and
+tenderness. But the insinuating poetry of chiaroscuro the camera is
+powerless to reproduce, and it cannot be imagined; Nature is
+parsimonious of this her greatest gift, surrendering it slowly, and
+only to those who love her best, and whose hearts are pure of
+mercenary thought.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
+
+
+This, the ninth season of the New English Art Club, has been marked by
+a decisive step. The club has rejected two portraits of Mr. Shannon.
+So that the public may understand and appreciate the importance of
+this step, I will sketch, _à coups de crayon peu fondus_, the portrait
+of a lady as I imagine Mr. Shannon might have painted her. A woman of
+thirty, an oval face, and a long white brow; pale brown hair,
+tastefully arranged with flowers and a small plume. The eyes large and
+tender, expressive of a soul that yearns and has been misunderstood.
+The nose straight, the nostrils well-defined, slightly dilated; the
+mouth curled, and very red. The shoulders large, white, and
+over-modelled, with cream tints; the arms soft and rounded; diamond
+bracelets on the wrists; diamonds on the emotional neck. Her dress is
+of the finest duchesse satin, and it falls in heavy folds. She holds a
+bouquet in her hands; a pale green garden is behind her; swans are
+moving gracefully through shadowy water, whereon the moon shines
+peacefully. Add to this conception the marvellous square brushwork of
+the French studio, and you have the man born to paint English
+duchesses--to paint them as they see themselves, as they would be seen
+by posterity; and through Mr. Shannon our duchesses realise all their
+aspirations, present and posthumous. The popularity of these pictures
+is undoubted; wherever they hang, and they hang everywhere, except in
+the New English Art Club, couples linger. "How charming, how
+beautifully dressed, how refined she looks!" and the wife who has not
+married a man _à la hauteur de ses sentiments_ casts on him a
+withering glance, which says, "Why can't you afford to let me be
+painted by Mr. Shannon?"
+
+We are here to realise our ideals, and far is it from my desire to
+thwart any lady in her aspirations, be they in white or violet satin,
+with or without green gardens. If I were on the hanging committee of
+the Royal Academy, all the duchesses in the kingdom should be
+realised, and then--I would create more duchesses, and they, too,
+should be realised by Messrs. Shannon, Hacker, and Solomon _les chefs
+de rayon de la peinture_. And when these painters arrived, each with a
+van filled with new satin duchesses, I would say, "Go to Mr. Agnew,
+ask him what space he requires, and anything over and above they shall
+have it." I would convert the Chantrey Fund into white satin
+duchesses, and build a museum opposite Mr. Tate's for the blue. I
+would do anything for these painters and their duchesses except hang
+them in the New English Art Club.
+
+For it is entirely necessary that the public should never be left for
+a moment in doubt as to the intention of this club. It is open to
+those who paint for the joy of painting; and it is entirely
+disassociated from all commercialism. Muslin ballet-girl or satin
+duchess it matters no jot, nothing counts with the jury but _l'idée
+plastique_: comradeship, money gain or loss, are waived. The rejection
+of Mr. Shannon's portraits will probably cost the club four guineas a
+year, the amount of his subscription, and it will certainly lose to
+the club the visits of his numerous drawing-room following. This is to
+be regretted--in a way. The club must pay its expenses, but it were
+better that the club should cease than that its guiding principle
+should be infringed.
+
+Either we may or we may not have a gallery from which popular painting
+is excluded. I think that we should; but I know that Academicians and
+dealers are in favour of enforced prostitution in art. That men should
+practise painting for the mere love of paint is wholly repugnant to
+every healthy-minded Philistine. The critic of the Daily Telegraph
+described the pictures in the present exhibition as things that no one
+would wish to possess; he then pointed out that a great many were
+excellently well painted. Quite so. I have always maintained that
+there is nothing that the average Englishman--the reader of the _Daily
+Telegraph_--dislikes so much as good painting. He regards it in the
+light of an offence, and what makes it peculiarly irritating in his
+eyes is the difficulty of declaring it to be an immoral action; he
+instinctively feels that it is immoral, but somehow the crime seems to
+elude definition.
+
+The Independent Theatre was another humble endeavour which sorely
+tried the conscience of the average Englishman. That any one should
+wish to write plays that were not intended to please the public--that
+did not pay--was an unheard-of desire, morbid and unwholesome as could
+well be, and meriting the severest rebuke. But the Independent Theatre
+has somehow managed to struggle into a third year of life, and the New
+English Art Club has opened its ninth exhibition; so I suppose that
+the _Daily Telegraph_ will have to make up its mind, sorrowfully, of
+course, and with regret, that there are folk still in London who are
+not always ready to sell their talents to the highest bidder.
+
+For painters and those who like painting, the exhibitions at the New
+English Art Club are the most interesting in London. We find there no
+anecdotes, sentimental, religious, or historical, nor the conventional
+measuring and modelling which the Academy delights to honour in the
+name of Art. At the New English Art Club, from the first picture to
+the last, we find artistic effort; very often the effort is feeble,
+but nowhere, try as persistently as you please, will you find the loud
+stupidity of ordinary exhibitions of contemporary painting. This is a
+plain statement of a plain truth--plain to artists and those few who
+possess the slightest knowledge of the art of painting, or even any
+faint love of it. But to the uncultivated, to the ignorant, and to the
+stupid the New English Art Club is the very place where all the absurd
+and abortive attempts done in painting in the course of the year are
+exposed on view. If I wished to test a man's taste and knowledge in
+the art of painting I would take him to the English Art Club and
+listen for one or two minutes to what he had got to say.
+
+Immediately on entering the room, before we see the pictures, we know
+that they are good. For a pleasant soft colour, delicate and
+insinuating as an odour of flowers, pervades the room. So we are glad
+to loiter in this vague sensation of delicate colour, and we talk to
+our friends, avoiding the pictures, until gradually a pale-faced woman
+with arched eyebrows draws our eyes and fixes our thoughts. It is a
+portrait by Mr. Sargent, one of the best he has painted. By the side
+of a fine Hals it might look small and thin, but nothing short of a
+fine Hals would affect its real beauty. My admiration for Mr. Sargent
+has often hesitated, but this picture completely wins me. It has all
+the qualities of Mr. Sargent's best work; and it has something more:
+it is painted with that measure of calculation and reserve which is
+present in all work of the first order of merit. I find the picture
+described with sufficient succinctness in my notes: "A half-length
+portrait of a woman, in a dress of shot-silk--a sort of red violet,
+the colour known as puce. The face is pale, the chin is prominent and
+pointed. There were some Japanese characteristics in the model, and
+these have been selected. The eyes are long, and their look is aslant;
+the eyebrows are high and marked; the dark hair grows round the pale
+forehead with wig-like abruptness, and the painter has attempted no
+attenuation. The carnations are wanting in depth of colour--they are
+somewhat chalky; but what I admire so much is the exquisite selection,
+besides the points mentioned--the shadowed outline, so full of the
+form of her face, and the markings about the eyes, so like her; and
+the rendering is full of the beauty of incomparable skill. The neck,
+how well placed beneath the pointed chin! How exact in width, in
+length, and how it corresponds with the ear; and the jawbone is under
+the skin; and the anatomies are all explicit--the collar-bone, the
+hollow of the arm-pit, and the muscle of the arm, the placing of the
+bosom, its shape, its size, its weight. Mr. Sargent's drawing speaks
+without hesitation, a beautiful, decisive eloquence, the meaning never
+in excess of the expression, nor is the expression ever redundant."
+
+I said that we find in this portrait reserve not frequently to be met
+with in Mr. Sargent's work. What I first noticed in the picture was
+the admirable treatment of the hands. They are upon her hips, the
+palms turned out, and so reduced is the tone that they are hardly
+distinguishable from the dress. As the model sat the light must have
+often fallen on her hands, and five years ago Mr. Sargent might have
+painted them in the light. But the portrait tells us that he has
+learnt the last and most difficult lesson--how to omit. Any touch of
+light on those hands would rupture the totality and jeopardise the
+colour-harmony, rare without suspicion of exaggeration or affectation.
+In the background a beautiful chocolate balances and enforces the
+various shades of the shot-silk, and with severity that is fortunate.
+By aid of two red poppies, worn in the bodice, a final note in the
+chord is reached--a resonant and closing consonance; a beautiful work,
+certainly: I should call it a perfect work were it not that the
+drawing is a little too obvious: in places we can detect the manner;
+it does not _coule de source_ like the drawing of the very great
+masters.
+
+Except Mr. Sargent, no one in the New English Art Club comes forward
+with a clearly formulated style; everything is more or less tentative,
+and I cannot entirely exempt from this criticism either Mr. Steer, Mr.
+Clausen, or Mr. Walter Sickert. But this criticism must not be
+understood as a reproach--surely this green field growing is more
+pleasing than the Academy's barren stubble. I claim no more for the
+New English Art Club than that it is the growing field. Say that the
+crop looks thin, and that the yield will prove below the average, but
+do not deny that what harvest there may be the New English Art Club
+will bring home. So let us walk round this May field of the young
+generation and look into its future, though we know that the summer
+months will disprove for better or for worse.
+
+Mr. Bernard Sickert, the youngest member of this club, a mere
+beginner, a five- or six-year-old painter, has made, from exhibition
+to exhibition, constant and consistent progress, and this year he
+comes forward with two landscapes, both seemingly conclusive of a true
+originality of vision, and there is a certain ease of accomplishment
+in his work which tempts me to believe that a future is in store for
+him. The differences of style in these two pictures do not affect my
+opinion, for, on looking into the pictures, the differences are more
+apparent than real--the palette has been composed differently, but
+neither picture tells of any desire of a new outlook, or even to
+radically change his mode of expression. The eye which observed and
+remembered so sympathetically "A Spring Evening", over which a red
+moon rose like an apparition, observed also the masts and the prows,
+and the blue sea gay with the life of passing sail and flag, and the
+green embaying land overlooking "A Regatta".
+
+I hardly know which picture I prefer. I saw first "A Regatta", and was
+struck by the beautiful drawing and painting of the line of boats,
+their noses thrust right up into the fore water of the picture, a
+little squadron advancing. So well are these boats drawn that the
+unusual perspective (the picture was probably painted from a window)
+does not interrupt for a second our enjoyment. A jetty on the right
+stretches into the blue sea water, intense with signs of life, and the
+little white sails glint in the blue bay, and behind the high green
+hill the colours of a faintly-tinted evening fade slowly. The picture
+is strangely complete, and it would be difficult to divine any reason
+for disliking it, even amongst the most ignorant. "A Spring Evening"
+is neither so striking nor so immediately attractive; its charm is
+none the less real. An insinuating and gentle picture, whose delicacy
+and simplicity I like.
+
+The painter has caught that passing and pathetic shudder of coming
+life which takes the end of a March day before the bud swells or a
+nest appears. The faint chill twilight floats upon the field, and the
+red moon mounts above the scrub-clad hillside into a rich grey sky,
+beautifully graduated and full of the glamour of waning and
+strengthening light. The slope of the field, too--it is there the
+sheep are folded--is in admirable perspective. On the left, beyond the
+hurdles, is a strip of green, perhaps a little out of tone, though I
+know such colour persists even in very receding lights; and high up on
+the right the blue night is beginning to show. The sheep are folded in
+a turnip field, and the root-crop is being eaten down.
+
+The month is surely March, for the lambs are still long-legged--there
+one has dropped on its knees and is digging at the udder of the
+passive ewe with that ferocious little gluttony which we know so well;
+another lamb relieves its ear's first itching with its hind hoof--you
+know the grotesque movement--and the field is full of the weird
+roaming of animal life, the pathos of the unconscious, the pity of
+transitory light. A little umber and sienna, a rich grey, not a bit of
+drawing anywhere, and still the wandering forms of sheep and lambs
+fully expressed, one sheep even in its particular physiognomy. Truly a
+charming picture, spontaneous and simple, and proving a painter
+possessed of a natural sentiment, of values, and willing to employ
+that now most neglected method of pictorial expression, chiaroscuro.
+
+Neglected by Mr. Steer, who seems prepared to dispense with what is
+known as _une atmosphère de tableau_. Any one of his three pictures
+will serve as an example. His portrait of a girl in blue I cannot
+praise, not because I do not admire it, but because Mr. MacColl, the
+art critic of the _Spectator_, our ablest art critic, himself a
+painter and a painter of talent, has declared it to be superior to a
+Romney. I will quote his words: "The word masterpiece is not to be
+lightly used, but when we stand before this picture it is difficult to
+think of any collection in which it would look amiss, or fail to hold
+its own. If we talk of English masters, Romney is the name that most
+naturally suggests itself, because in the bright clear face and brown
+hair and large simplicity of presentment, there is a good deal to
+recall that painter. But Romney's colour would look cheap beside this,
+and his drawing conventional in observation, however big in style."
+
+To go one better than this, I should have to say the picture was as
+good as Velasquez, and to simply endorse Mr. MacColl's words would be
+a second-hand sort of criticism to which I am not accustomed. Besides,
+to do so would be to express nothing of my own personal sensations in
+regard to this picture. So I will say at once that I do not understand
+the introduction of Romney's name into the argument. If comparison
+there must be, surely Mr. Watts would furnish one more appropriate.
+Both in the seeing and in the execution the portrait seems nearer to
+Mr. Watts than to Romney. Of Romney's gaiety there is no trace in Mr.
+Steer's picture.
+
+The girl sits in a light wooden arm-chair--her arm stretched in front
+of her, the hands held between her knees--looking out of the picture
+somewhat stolidly. The Lady Hamilton mood was an exaggerated mood, but
+there is something of it in every portrait at all characteristic of
+our great eighteenth-century artist. The portrait exhibited in this
+year's show of Old Masters in the Academy will do--the lady who walks
+forward, her hands held in front of her bosom, the fingers pressed
+together, the white dress floating from the hips, the white brought
+down with a yellow glaze. I do not think that we find either that
+gaiety or those glazes in Mr. Steer. From many a Romney the cleaner
+has removed an outer skin, but I am not speaking of those pictures.
+
+But if I see very little Romney in Steer's picture, I am thankful that
+I see at least very rare distinction in the figuration of a beautiful
+and decorative ideal--a girl in blue sitting with her back to an open
+window, full of the blue night, and on the other side the grey blind,
+yellowing slightly under the glare of the lamp. I appreciate the very
+remarkable and beautiful compromise between portrait-painting and
+decoration. I see rare distinction (we must not be afraid of the word
+distinction in speaking of Mr. Steer) in his choice of what to draw.
+The colour scheme is well maintained, somewhat in the manner of Mr.
+Watts, but neither the blue of the dress nor the blue of the night is
+intrinsically beautiful, and we have only to think of the blues that
+Whistler or Manet would have found to understand how deficient they
+are.
+
+The drawing of the face is neither a synthesis, nor is it intimately
+characteristic of the model: it is simply rudimentary. A round girlish
+face with a curled mouth and an ugly shadow which does not express the
+nose. The shoulders are there, that we are told, but the anatomies are
+wanting, and the body is without its natural thickness. Nor is the
+drawing more explicit in its exterior lines than it is in its inner.
+There is hardly an arm in that sleeve; the elbow would be difficult to
+find, and the construction of the waist and hips is uncertain; the
+drawing does not speak like Mr. Sargent's. Look across the room at his
+portrait of a lady in white satin and you will see there a shadow, so
+exact, so precise, so well understood, that the width of the body is
+placed beyond doubt.
+
+But the most radical fault in the portrait I have yet to point out; it
+is lacking in atmosphere. There is none between us and the girl,
+hardly any between the girl's head and the wall. The lamp-light effect
+is conveyed by what Mr. MacColl would perhaps call a symbol, by the
+shadow of the girl's head. We look in vain for transparent darknesses,
+lights surrounded by shadows, transposition of tones, and the aspect
+of things; the girl sits in a full diffused light, and were it not for
+the shadow on the wall and the shadow cast by the nose, she might be
+sitting in a conservatory. Speaking of another picture by Mr. Steer,
+"Boulogne Sands", Mr. MacColl says: "The children playing, the holiday
+encampment of the bathers' tents, the glint of people flaunting
+themselves like flags, the dazzle of sand and sea, and over and
+through it all the chattering lights of noon." I seize upon the
+phrase, "The people flaunting themselves like flags." The simile is a
+pretty one, and what suggested it to the writer is the detached colour
+in the picture; and the colours are detached because there is no
+atmosphere to bind them together; there are no attenuations,
+transpositions of tone--in a word, none of those combinations of light
+and shade which make _une atmosphère de tableau_.
+
+And Mr. Steer's picture is merely an instance of a general tendency
+which for the last twenty years has widened the gulf between modern
+and ancient painting. It was Manet who first suggested _la peinture
+claire_, and his suggestion has been developed by Roll, Monet, and
+others, until oil-painting has become little more than a sheet of
+white paper slightly tinted. Values have been diverted from their
+original mission, which was to build up _une atmosphère de tableau_,
+and now every value and colour finely observed seem to have for
+mission the abolition of chiaroscuro. Without atmosphere painting
+becomes a mosaic, and Mr. MacColl seems prepared to defend this return
+to archaic formulas. This is what he says: "The sky of the sea-beach,
+for example, if it be taken as representing form and texture, is
+ridiculous; it is like something rough and chippy, and if the
+suggestion gets too much in the way the method has overshot its mark.
+Its mark is to express by a symbol the vivid life in the sky-colour,
+the sea-colour, and the sand-colour, and it is doubtful if the
+richness and subtlety of those colours can be conveyed in any other
+way." Here I fail altogether to understand. If the sky's beauty can be
+expressed by a symbol, why cannot the beauty of men and women be
+expressed in the same way? How the infinities of aërial perspective
+can be expressed by a symbol, I have no slightest notion; nor do I
+think that Mr. MacColl has. In striving to excuse deficiencies in a
+painter whose very real and loyal talent we both admire, he has
+allowed his pen to run into dangerous sophistries. "The matter of
+handling," he continues, "is then a moot point--a question of
+temperament." Is this so?
+
+That some men are born with a special aptitude for handling colour as
+other men are born with a special sense of proportions is undeniable;
+but Mr. MacColl's thought goes further than this barren platitude, and
+if he means, as I think he does, that the faculty of handling is more
+instinctive than that of drawing, I should like to point out to him
+that handling did not become a merely personal caprice until the
+present century. A collection of ancient pictures does not present
+such endless experimentation with the material as a collection of
+modern pictures. Rubens, Hals, Velasquez, and Gainsborough do not
+contradict each other so violently regarding their use of the material
+as do Watts, Leighton, Millais, and Orchardson.
+
+In the nineteenth century no one has made such beautiful use of the
+material as Manet and Whistler, and we find these two painters using
+it respectively exactly like Hals and Velasquez. It would therefore
+seem that those who excel in the use of paint are agreed as to the
+handling of it, just as all good dancers are agreed as to the step.
+But, though all good dancers dance the same step, each brings into his
+practice of it an individuality of movement and sense of rhythm
+sufficient to prevent it from becoming mechanical. The ancient
+painters relied on differences of feeling and seeing for originality
+rather than on eccentric handling of colour; and all these
+extraordinary executions which we meet in every exhibition of modern
+pictures are in truth no more than frantic efforts either to escape
+from the thraldom of a bad primary education, or attempts to disguise
+ignorance in fantastic formulas. That which cannot be referred back to
+the classics is not right, and I at least know not where to look among
+the acknowledged masters for justification for Mr. Steer's jagged
+brushwork.
+
+Mr. Walter Sickert, whose temperament is more irresponsible, is
+nevertheless content within the traditions of oil-painting. He
+exhibits two portraits, both very clever and neither satisfactory, for
+neither are carried beyond the salient lines of character. Nature has
+gifted Mr. Sickert with a keen hatred of the commonplace; his vision
+of life is at once complex and fragmentary, his command on drawing
+slow and uncertain, his rendering therefore as spasmodic as a poem by
+Browning. He picks up the connecting links with difficulty, and even
+his most complete work is full of omissions. The defect--for it is a
+defect--is by no means so fatal in the art-value of a painting as the
+futile explanations so dearly beloved by the ignorant. Manet was to
+the end the victim of man's natural dislike of ellipses, and Mr.
+Walter Sickert is suffering the same fate. Still, even the most remote
+intelligence should be able to gather something of the merit of the
+portrait of Miss Minnie Cunningham. How well she is in that long red
+frock--a vermilion silhouette on a rich brown background! I should be
+still more pleased if the vermilion had been slightly broken with
+yellow ochre; but then, at heart, I am no more than _un vieux
+classique_. The edges of the vermilion hat are lightened where it
+receives the glare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer
+from the red. It is as light, as pretty, as suggestive as may be. The
+thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of
+the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a manner I have not
+seen elsewhere, the enigma of the artificial life of the stage.
+
+The aestheticism of the Glasgow school, of which we have heard so much
+lately, is identical with that of the New English Art Club, and the
+two societies are in a measure affiliated. Nearly all the members of
+the Glasgow school are members of the New English Art Club, and it is
+regrettable that they do not unite and give us an exhibition that
+would fairly stare the Academy out of countenance. Among the Glasgow
+painters the most prominent and valid talent is Mr. Guthrie's. His
+achievements are more considerable and more personal; and he seems to
+approach very near to a full expression of the pictorial aspirations
+of his generation. Years ago his name was made known to me by a
+portrait of singular beauty; an oasis it was in a barren and bitter
+desert of Salon pictures. Since then he has adopted a different and
+better method of painting; and an excellent example of his present
+style is his portrait of Miss Spencer, a lady in a mauve gown. The
+slightness of the intention may be urged against the picture; it is no
+more than a charming decoration faintly flushed with life. But in his
+management of the mauve Mr. Guthrie achieved quite a little triumph:
+and the foreground, which is a very thin grey passed over a dark
+ground, is delicious, and the placing of the signature is in the right
+place. Most artists sign their pictures in the same place. But the
+signature should take a different place in every picture, for in every
+picture there is one and only one right place for the signature; and
+the true artist never fails to find the place which his work has
+chosen and consecrated for his name.
+
+I confess myself to be a natural and instinctive admirer of Mr.
+Guthrie's talent. His picture, "Midsummer", exhibited at Liverpool,
+charmed me. Turning to my notes I find this description of it: "A
+garden in the summer's very moment of complete efflorescence; a bower
+of limpid green, here and there interwoven with red flowers. And three
+ladies are there with their tiny Japanese tea-table. One dress--that
+on the left--is white, like a lily, drenched with green shadows; the
+dress on the right is a purple, beautiful as the depth of foxglove
+bells, A delicate and yet a full sensation of the beauty of modern
+life, from which all grossness has been omitted--a picture for which I
+think Corot would have had a good word to say." In the same exhibition
+there was a pastel by Mr. Guthrie, which quite enchanted me with its
+natural, almost naïve, grace. Turning to my notes I extract the
+following lines: "A lady seated on a light chair, her body in profile,
+her face turned towards the spectator; she wears a dress with red
+stripes. One hand hanging by her side, the other hand holding open a
+flame-coloured fan; and it is this that makes the picture. The feet
+laid one over the other. The face, a mere indication; and for the
+hair, charcoal, rubbed and then heightened by two or three touches of
+the rich black of pastel-chalk. A delicate, a precious thing, rich in
+memories of Watteau and Whistler, of boudoir inspiration, and whose
+destination is clearly the sitting-room of a dilettante bachelor."
+
+Mr. Henry, another prominent member of the Glasgow school, exhibited a
+portrait of a lady in a straw hat--a rich and beautiful piece of
+painting, somewhat "made up" and over-modelled, still a piece of
+painting that one would like to possess. Mr. Hornell's celebrated
+"Midsummer", the detestation of aldermen, was there too. Imagine the
+picture cards, the ten of diamonds, and the eight of hearts shuffled
+rapidly upon a table covered with a Persian tablecloth. To ignore what
+are known as values seems to be the first principle of the Glasgow
+school. Hence a crude and discordant coloration without depth or
+richness. Hence an absence of light and the mystery of aërial
+perspective. But I have spoken very fully on this subject elsewhere.
+
+Fifteen years ago it was customary to speak slightingly of the Old
+Masters, and it was thought that their mistakes could be easily
+rectified. Their dark skies and black foregrounds hold their own
+against all Monet's cleverness, and it has begun to be suspected that
+even if nature be industriously and accurately copied in the fields,
+the result is not always a picture. The palette gives the value of the
+grass and of the trees, but, alas, not of the sky-the sky is higher in
+tone than the palette can go; the painter therefore gets a false
+value. Hence the tendency among the _plein airists_ to leave out the
+sky or to do with as little sky as possible. A little reef is
+sufficient to bring about a great shipwreck; a generation has wasted
+half its life, and the Old Masters are again becoming the fashion. Mr.
+Furse seems to be deeply impressed with the truth of the _new_
+aestheticism. And he has succeeded within the limits of a tiny panel,
+a slight but charming intention. "The Great Cloud" rolls over a strip
+of lowland, lowering in a vast imperial whiteness, vague and shadowy
+as sleep or death. Ruysdael would have stopped for a moment to watch
+it. But its lyrical lilt would trouble a mind that could only think in
+prose; Shelley would like it better, and most certainly it would not
+fail to recall to his mind his own immortal verses--
+
+  "I am the daughter of earth and water,
+     And the nursling of the sky;
+   I pass through the pores of ocean and shores,
+     I change, but I cannot die."
+
+
+What will become of our young artists and their aspirations is a tale
+that time will unfold gradually, and for the larger part of its
+surprises we shall have to wait ten years. In ten years many of these
+aesthetes will have become common Academicians, working for the villas
+and perambulators of numerous families. Many will have disappeared for
+ever, some may be resurrected two generations hence, may be raised
+from the dead like Mr. Brabazon, our modern Lazarus--
+
+  "Lazare allait mourir une seconds fois,"--
+
+or perchance to sleep for ever in Sir Joshua's bosom. That a place
+will be found there for Mr. Brabazon is one of the articles of faith
+of the younger generation. Mr. Brabazon is described as an amateur,
+and the epithet is marvellously appropriate; no one--not even the
+great masters--deserved it better. The love of a long life is in those
+water-colours--they are all love; out of love they have grown, in its
+light they have flourished, and they have been made lovely with love.
+
+In a time of slushy David Coxes, Mr. Brabazon's eyes were strangely
+his own. Even then he saw Nature hardly explained at all--films of
+flowing colour transparent as rose-leaves, the lake's blue, and the
+white clouds curling above the line of hills--a sense of colour and a
+sense of distance, that was all, and he had the genius to remain
+within the limitations of his nature. And, with the persistency of
+true genius, Mr. Brabazon painted, with a flowing brush, rose-leaf
+water-colours, unmindful of the long indifference of two generations,
+until it happened that the present generation, with its love of slight
+things, came upon this undiscovered genius. It has hailed him as
+master, and has dragged him into the popularity of a special
+exhibition of his work at the Goupil Galleries. And it was inevitable
+that the present young men should discover Mr. Brabazon: for in
+discovering him, they were discovering themselves--his art is no more
+than a curious anticipation of the artistic ideal of to-day.
+
+The sketch he exhibits at the New English Art Club is a singularly
+beautiful tint of rose, spread with delicate grace over the paper. A
+little less, and there would be nothing; but a little beauty has
+always seemed to me preferable to a great deal of ugliness. And what
+is true about one is true about nearly all his drawings. We find in
+them always an harmonious colour contrast, and very rarely anything
+more. Sometimes there are those evanescent gradations of colour which
+are the lordship and signature of the colourist, and when _le ton
+local_ is carried through the picture, through the deepest shadows as
+through the highest lights, when we find it persisting everywhere, as
+we do in No. 19, "Lake Maggiore", we feel in our souls the joy that
+comes of perfect beauty. But too frequently Mr. Brabazon's colour is
+restricted to an effective contrast; he often skips a great many
+notes, touching the extremes of the octave with certainty and with
+grace.
+
+But it is right that we should make a little fuss over Mr. Brabazon;
+for though this work is slight, it is an accomplishment--he has
+indubitably achieved a something, however little that something may
+be; and when art is disappearing in the destroying waters of
+civilisation, we may catch at straws. Beyond colour--and even in
+colour his limitations are marked--Mr. Brabazon cannot go. He entered
+St. Mark's, and of the delicacy of ornamentation, of the balance of
+the architecture, he saw nothing; neither the tracery of carven column
+nor the aërial perspective of the groined arches. It was his genius
+not to see these things--to leave out the drawing is better than to
+fumble with it, and all his life he has done this; and though we may
+say that a water-colour with the drawing left out is a very slight
+thing, we cannot fail to perceive that these sketches, though less
+than sonnets or ballades, or even rondeaus or rondels--at most they
+are triolets--are akin to the masters, however distant the
+relationship.
+
+I have not told you about the very serious progress that Mr. George
+Thompson has made since the last exhibition; I have not described his
+two admirable pictures; nor mentioned Mr. Linder's landscape, nor Mr.
+Buxton Knight's "Haymaking Meadows", nor Mr. Christie's pretty picture
+"A May's Frolic," nor Mr. MacColl's "Donkey Race". I have omitted much
+that it would have been a pleasure to praise; for my intention was not
+to write a guide to the exhibition, but to interpret some of the
+characteristics of the young generation.
+
+The New English Art Club is very typical of this end of the century.
+It is young, it is interesting, it is intelligent, it is emotional, it
+is cosmopolitan--not the Bouillon Duval cosmopolitanism of the Newlyn
+School, but rather an agreeable assimilation of the Montmartre café of
+fifteen years ago. Art has fallen in France, and the New English seems
+to me like a seed blown over-sea from a ruined garden. It has caught
+English root, and already English colour and fragrance are in the
+flower. A frail flower; but, frail or strong, it is all we have of art
+in the present generation. It is slight, and so most typical; for,
+surely, no age was ever so slight in its art as ours? As the century
+runs on it becomes more and more slight and more and more intelligent.
+A sheet of Whatman's faintly flushed with a rose-tint, a few stray
+verses characterised with a few imperfect rhymes and a wrong accent,
+are sufficient foundation for two considerable reputations. The
+education of the younger generation is marvellous; its brains are
+excellent; it seems to be lacking in nothing except guts. As education
+spreads guts disappear, and that is the most serious word I have to
+say.
+
+Without thinking of those great times when men lived in the giddiness
+and the exultation of a constant creation--when a day was sufficient
+for Rubens to paint the "Kermesse" thirteen days to paint the "Mages",
+even or eight to paint the "Communion de St. François d'Assise"--and
+blotting from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and
+Veronese, let us merely remember that thirty years ago Millais painted
+a beautiful picture every year until marriage and its consequences
+brought his art to a sudden close. One year it was "Autumn Leaves",
+the following year it was "St. Agnes' Eve", and behind these pictures
+there were at least ten masterpieces--"The Orchard", "The Rainbow",
+"Mariana in the Moated Grange", "Ophelia", etc. Millais is far behind
+Veronese and Tintoretto in magnificent excellence and extraordinary
+rapidity of production; but is not the New English Art Club even as
+far behind the excellence and fertility of production of thirty years
+ago?
+
+
+
+
+A GREAT ARTIST.
+
+
+We have heard the words "great artist" used so often and so carelessly
+that their tremendous significance escapes. The present is a time when
+it is necessary to consider the meaning, latent and manifest, of the
+words, for we are about to look on the drawings of the late Charles
+Keene.
+
+In many the words evoke the idea of huge canvases in which historical
+incidents are depicted, conquerors on black horses covered with gold
+trappings, or else figures of Christ, or else the agonies of martyrs.
+The portrayal of angels is considered by the populace to be especially
+imaginative, and all who affect such subjects are at least in their
+day termed great artists. But the words are capable of a less vulgar
+interpretation. To the select few the great artist is he who is most
+racy of his native soil, he who has most persistently cultivated his
+talent in one direction, and in one direction only, he who has
+repeated himself most often, he who has lived upon himself the most
+avidly. In art, eclecticism means loss of character, and character is
+everything in art. I do not mean by character personal idiosyncrasies;
+I mean racial and territorial characteristics. Of personal
+idiosyncrasy we have enough and to spare. Indeed, it has come to be
+accepted almost as an axiom that it does not matter much how badly you
+paint, provided you do not paint badly like anybody else. But instead
+of noisy idiosyncrasy we want the calm of national character in our
+art. A national character can only be acquired by remaining at home
+and saturating ourselves in the spirit of our land until it oozes from
+our pens and pencils in every slightest word, in every slightest
+touch. Our lives should be one long sacrifice for this one
+thing--national character. Foreign travel should be eschewed, we
+should turn our eyes from Paris and Rome and fix them on our own
+fields; we should strive to remain ignorant, making our lives
+mole-like, burrowing only in our own parish soil. There are no
+universities in art, but there are village schools; each of us should
+choose his master, imitate him humbly, striving to continue the
+tradition. And while labouring thus humbly, rather as handicraftsmen
+than as artists, our personality will gradually begin to appear in our
+work, not the weak febrile idiosyncrasy which lights a few hours of
+the artist's youth, but a steady flame nourished by the rich oil of
+excellent lessons. If the work is good, very little personality is
+required. Are the individual temperaments of Terburg, Metzu, and Peter
+de Hoogh very strikingly exhibited in their pictures?
+
+The paragraph I have just written will seem like a digression to the
+careless reader, but he who has read carefully, or will take the
+trouble to glance back, will not fail to see, that although in
+appearance digressive, it is a strict and accurate comment on Charles
+Keene, and the circumstances in which his art was produced. Charles
+Keene never sought after originality; on the contrary, he began by
+humbly imitating John Leech, the inventor of the method. His earliest
+drawings (few if any of them are exhibited in the present collection)
+were hardly distinguishable from Leech's. He continued the tradition
+humbly, and originality stole upon him unawares. Charles Keene was not
+an erudite, he thought of very little except his own talent and the
+various aspects of English life which he had the power of depicting;
+but he knew thoroughly well the capacities of his talent, the
+direction in which it could be developed, and his whole life was
+devoted to its cultivation. He affected neither a knowledge of
+literature nor of Continental art; he lived in England and for
+England, content to tell the story of his own country and the age he
+lived in; in a word, he worked and lived as did the Dutchmen of 1630.
+He lived pure of all foreign influence; no man's art was ever so
+purely English as Keene's; even the great Dutchmen themselves were not
+more Dutch than Keene was English, and the result is often hardly less
+surprising. To look at some of these drawings and not think of the
+Dutchmen is impossible, for when we are most English we are most
+Dutch--our art came from Holland. These drawings are Dutch in the
+strange simplicity and directness of intention; they are Dutch in
+their oblivion to all interests except those of good drawing; they are
+Dutch in the beautiful quality of the workmanship. Examine the rich,
+simple drawing of that long coat or the side of that cab, and say if
+there is not something of the quality of a Terburg. Terburg is simple
+as a page of seventeenth-century prose; and in Keene there is the same
+deep, rich, classic simplicity. The material is different, but the
+feeling is the same. I might, of course, say Jan Steen; and is it not
+certain that both Terburg and Steen, working under the same
+conditions, would not have produced drawings very like Keene's? And
+now, looking through the material deep into the heart of the thing, is
+it a paradox to say that No. 221 is in feeling and quality of
+workmanship a Dutch picture of the best time? The scene depicted is
+the honeymoon. The young wife sits by an open window full of sunlight,
+and the curtains likewise are drenched in the pure white light. How
+tranquil she is, how passive in her beautiful animal life! No complex
+passion stirs in that flesh; instinct drowses in her just as in an
+animal. With what animal passivity she looks up in her husband's face!
+Look at that peaceful face, that high forehead, how clearly conceived
+and how complete is the rendering! How slight the means, how
+extraordinary the result! The sunlight floods the sweet face so
+exquisitively stupid, and her soul, and the room, and the very
+conditions of life of these people are revealed to us.
+
+And now, in a very rough and fragmentary fashion, hardly attempting
+more than a hurried transcription of my notes, I will call attention
+to some three or four drawings which especially arrested my attention.
+In No. 10 we have a cab seen in wonderful perspective; the hind wheel
+is the nearest point, and in extraordinarily accurate proportion the
+vehicle and the animal attached to it go up the paper. The cabman
+turns half round to address some observation to the "fare", an old
+gentleman, who is about to step in. The roof of the cab cuts the body
+of the cabman, composing the picture in a most original and striking
+manner. The panels of the cab are filled in with simple straight
+lines, but how beautifully graduated are these lines, how much they
+are made to say! Above all, the hesitating movement of the old
+gentleman--how the exact moment has been caught! and the treatment of
+the long coat, how broad, how certain--how well the artist has said
+exactly what he wanted to say! Another very fine drawing is No. 11.
+The fat farmer stands so thoroughly well in his daily habit; the great
+stomach, how well it is drawn, and the short legs are part and parcel
+of the stomach. The man is redolent of turnip-fields and rick-yards;
+all the life of the fields is upon him. And the long parson, clearly
+from the university, how well he clasps his hands and how the very
+soul of the man is expressed in the gesture! No. 16 is very wonderful.
+What movement there is in the skirts of the fat woman, and the legs of
+the vendor of penny toys! Are they not the very legs that the gutter
+breeds?
+
+No. 52: a big, bluff artist, deep-seated amid the ferns and grasses.
+The big, bearded man, who thinks of nothing but his art, who lives in
+it, who would not be thin because fat enables him to sit longer out of
+doors, the man who will not even turn round on his camp-stool to see
+the woman who is speaking to him; we have all known that man, but to
+me that man never really existed until I looked on this drawing. And
+the treatment of the trees that make the background! A few touches of
+the pencil, and how hot and alive the place is with sunlight!
+
+But perhaps the most wonderful drawing in the entire collection is No.
+89. Never did Keene show greater mastery over his material. In this
+drawing every line of the black-lead pencil is more eloquent than
+Demosthenes' most eloquent period. The roll and the lurch of the
+vessel, the tumult of waves and wind, the mental and physical
+condition of the passengers, all are given as nothing in this world
+could give them except that magic pencil. The figure, the man that the
+wind blows out of the picture, his hat about to leave his head, is not
+he really on board in a gale? Did a frock coat flap out in the wind so
+well before? And do not the attitudes of the two women leaning over
+the side represent their suffering? The man who is not sea-sick sits,
+his legs stretched out, his hands thrust into his pockets, his face
+sunk on his breast, his hat crushed over his eyes. His pea-jacket, how
+well drawn! and can we not distinguish the difference between its
+cloth and the cloth of the frock of the city merchant, who watches
+with such a woful gaze the progress of the gathering wave? The weight
+of the wave is indicated with a few straight lines, and, strangely
+enough, only very slightly varied are the lines which give the very
+sensation of the merchant's thin frock coat made in the shop of a
+fashionable tailor.
+
+It has been said that Keene could not draw a lady or a gentleman. Why
+not add that he was neither a tennis player nor a pigeon shot, a
+waltzer nor an accomplished French scholar? The same terrible
+indictment has been preferred against Dickens, and Mr. Henry James
+says that Balzac failed to prove he was a gentleman. It might be well
+to remind Mr. James that the artist who would avoid the fashion plate
+would do well to turn to the coster rather than the duke for
+inspiration. Keene's genius saved him from the drawing-room, never
+allowing his gaze to wander from where English characteristics may be
+gathered most plentifully--the middle and lower classes.
+
+I find in my notes mention of other drawings quite as wonderful as
+those I have spoken of, but space only remains to give some hint of
+Keene's place among draughtsmen. As a humorist he was certainly thin
+compared to Leech; as a satirist he was certainly feeble compared to
+Gavarni; in dramatic, not to say imaginative, qualities he cannot be
+spoken of in the same breath as Cruikshank; but as an artist was he
+not their superior?
+
+
+
+
+NATIONALITY IN ART.
+
+
+In looking through a collection of Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, Dobsons,
+Morlands, we are moved by something more than the artistic beauty of
+the pictures. Seeing that peaceful farmyard by Morland, a dim remote
+life, a haunting in the blood, rises to the surface of the brain, like
+a water-flower or weed brought by a sudden current into sight of the
+passing sky. Seeing that quiet man talking with his swineherd, we are
+mysteriously attracted, and are perplexed as by a memory; we grow
+aware of his house and wife, and though these things passed away more
+than a hundred years ago, we know them all. That other picture,
+"Partridge Shooting", by Stubbs, how familiar and how intimate it is
+to us! and those days seem to go back and back into long ago, beyond
+childhood into infancy. The life of the picture goes back into the
+life that we heard from our father's, our grandfather's lips, a life
+of reminiscence and little legend, the end of which passed like a
+wraith across the dawn of our lives. For we need not be very old to
+remember the squire ramming the wads home and calling to the setter
+that is too eagerly pressing forward the pointer in the turnips. A man
+of fifty can remember seeing the mail coach swing round the curve of
+the wide, smooth coach roads; and a man of forty, going by road to the
+Derby, and the block which came seven miles from Epsom. And so do
+these pictures take us to the heart of England, to the heart of our
+life, which is England, to that great circumstance which preceded our
+birth, and which gave not merely flesh and blood, but the minds that
+are thinking now. We have only to pass through a doorway to see
+sublimer works of art. But though Troyon and Courbet were greater
+artists than Morland, Morland whispers something that is beyond art,
+beyond even our present life; as a shell with the sound of the sea,
+these canvases are murmurous with the under life.
+
+That young lady so charmingly dressed in white, she who holds a rose
+in her hand, is Miss Kitty Calcraft, by Romney. Do we not seem to know
+her? We ask when we met her, and where we spoke to her; and that
+mystic when and where seem more real than the moment of present life.
+The present crowd of living folk fades from us, and we half believe,
+half know, that she spoke to us one evening on that terrace
+overlooking those wide pasture lands. We see the happy light of her
+eyes and hear the joy of her voice, and they stir in us all the
+impulses of race, of kith and kin.
+
+Romney is often crude, but the worst that can be urged against this
+portrait is that it is superficial. But what charm and grace there is
+in its superficiality! Romney was aware of the grace and charm of the
+young girl as she sat before him in her white dress: he saw her as a
+flower; and in fluent, agreeable, well-bred and cultivated speech he
+has talked to us about her. The portrait has the charm of rare and
+exquisite conversation; we float in a tide of sensation. He was only
+aware of her white dress, her pretty arm and hand laid on her soft
+lap. But while we merely see Kitty, we perceive and think of
+Gainsborough's portrait of Miss Willoughby. We realise her in other
+circumstances, away from the beautiful blue trees under which he has
+so happily placed her; we can see her receiving visitors on the
+terrace, or leaning over the balustrade looking down the valley,
+wondering why life has come to her so sadly. We see her in her
+eighteenth-century drawing-room amid Chippendale and Adams furniture,
+reading an old novel. No one ever cared much about Miss Willoughby.
+There is little sensuous charm in her long narrow face, in her hair
+falling in ringlets over her shoulders; and we are sure that she often
+reflected on the bitterness of life. But Kitty never looked into the
+heart of things: when life coincided with her desires, she laughed and
+was glad; when things, to use her own words, "went wrong", she wept.
+And in these two portraits we read the stories of the painters' souls.
+
+But the question of nationality, of country, in art detains us.
+Beautiful beyond compare is the art of Tourguenieff; but how much more
+intimate, how much deeper is the delight that a Russian finds in his
+novels than ours! However truly the purely artistic qualities may
+touch us--great art is universal--we miss our native land and our
+race in Tourguenieff. We find both in Dickens, in Thackeray. Miss
+Austen and Fielding have little else; and vague though Fielding may be
+in form, still his pages are England, and they whisper the life we
+inherited from long ago. The superb Rembrandt in the next room, the
+Gentleman with a Hawk, lent by the Duke of Westminster, is a human
+revelation. We only perceive in it the charm, the adorableness, the
+eternal adventure of youth; nationality disappears in the universal.
+This beautiful portrait was painted in 1643, a year after the
+"Night-watch". The date of the portrait of the Lady with the Fan is
+not given. They differ widely in style; the portrait of the man is ten
+years in advance of the portrait of the woman; it seems to approach
+very closely, to touch on, the great style which he attained in 1664,
+the year when he painted the Syndics. Of his early style, thin,
+crabbed, and yellow, there is hardly a trace in the portrait of the
+Man with the Hawk; it is almost a complete emancipation, yet it would
+be rash to say that the Lady with the Fan is an early work, painted in
+the days of the Lesson in Anatomy. In Rembrandt's work we find sudden
+advancements towards the grand final style, and these are immediately
+followed by hasty returnings to the hard, dry, and essentially
+unromantic manner of 1634. The portrait of the Young Man with the Hawk
+was painted in middle life. But if it contains something more than the
+suggestion of the qualities which twenty years later he developed and
+perfected for the admiration of all time, if the immortal flower of
+Rembrandt's genius was still unblown, this is blossom prematurely
+breaking. The young man is shown upon darkness like a vision: the face
+is illuminated mysteriously, the brush-work is large and firm, the
+paint is substantial without being heavy, the canvas is smoky, an
+unnatural and yet a real atmosphere surrounds the head. The black
+velvet cap strikes in sharp relief against the background, which
+lightens to a grey-green about the head. The modelling of the face is
+extraordinarily large and simple, and yet without omissions; we have
+in this portrait a perfect example of the art of being precise without
+being small. The young man is a young nobleman. He stands before us
+looking at us, and yet his eyes are not fixed; his moustache is golden
+and frizzled; his cheeks are coloured slightly; but the picture is
+practically made of a few greys and greens, and white, slightly tinted
+with bitumen; yet we do not feel, or feel very little, any lack of
+colouring matter. Rembrandt realised in the romantic young man his
+ideal of young masculine beauty. Truly a beautiful work, neither the
+boyhood nor the manhood, but the adolescence of Rembrandt's genius.
+
+Between the portrait of the Lady with a Fan and Sir Joshua's portrait
+of Miss Frances Crewe it would be permissible to hesitate; but to
+hesitate even for one instant between Miss Crewe and the Young Man
+with the Hawk would be unpardonable. Sir Joshua painted as he thought;
+he had an instinctive sense of decoration and a deep and tender
+feeling for beauty; he was especially sensible to the agreeable and
+gay aspect of things; his eyes at once seize the pleasing and
+picturesque contour, and his mind divined a charming and effective
+scheme of colour. He saw character too; all the surface
+characteristics of his model were plain to him, and when he was so
+minded he painted with rare intelligence and insight. He did not see
+deeply, but he saw clearly. Gainsborough did not see so clearly, nor
+was his hand as prompt to express his vision as Sir Joshua's; but
+Gainsborough saw further, for he felt more keenly and more profoundly.
+But light indeed were their minds compared with Rembrandt's. Rembrandt
+was a great visionary; to him the outsides of things were symbols of
+elemental truths, which he expressed in a form mighty as the truths
+themselves. There is no question of comparison between him on one hand
+and Reynolds and Gainsborough on the other. Yet we should hesitate to
+destroy our Reynolds and Gainsboroughs, to preserve any works of art,
+however beautiful. Were we to keep what our reason told us was the
+greatest, we should feel as one who surrendered England to save the
+rest of the world, or as a parent who sacrificed his children to save
+a million men from the scaffold.
+
+
+
+
+SEX IN ART.
+
+
+Woman's nature is more facile and fluent than man's. Women do things
+more easily than men, but they do not penetrate below the surface, and
+if they attempt to do so the attempt is but a clumsy masquerade in
+unbecoming costume. In their own costume they have succeeded as
+queens, courtesans, and actresses, but in the higher arts, in
+painting, in music, and literature, their achievements are slight
+indeed--best when confined to the arrangements of themes invented by
+men--amiable transpositions suitable to boudoirs and fans.
+
+I have heard that some women hold that the mission of their sex
+extends beyond the boudoir and the nursery. It is certainly not within
+my province to discuss so important a question, but I think it is
+clear that all that is best in woman's art is done within the limits I
+have mentioned. This conclusion is well-nigh forced upon us when we
+consider what would mean the withdrawal of all that women have done in
+art. The world would certainly be the poorer by some half-dozen
+charming novels, by a few charming poems and sketches in oil and
+water-colour; but it cannot be maintained, at least not seriously,
+that if these charming triflings were withdrawn there would remain any
+gap in the world's art to be filled up. Women have created nothing,
+they have carried the art of men across their fans charmingly, with
+exquisite taste, delicacy, and subtlety of feeling, and they have
+hideously and most mournfully parodied the art of men. George Eliot is
+one in whom sex seems to have hesitated, and this unfortunate
+hesitation was afterwards intensified by unhappy circumstances. She
+was one of those women who so entirely mistook her vocation as to
+attempt to think, and really if she had assumed the dress and the
+duties of a policeman, her failure could hardly have been more
+complete. Jane Austen, on the contrary, adventured in no such dismal
+masquerade; she was a nice maiden lady, gifted with a bright clear
+intelligence, diversified with the charms of light wit and fancy, and
+as she was content to be in art what she was in nature, her books
+live, while those of her ponderous rival are being very rapidly
+forgotten. "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda" are dead beyond hope of
+resurrection; "The Mill on the Floss", being more feminine, still
+lives, even though its destiny is to be forgotten when "Pride and
+Prejudice" is remembered.
+
+Sex is as important an element in a work of art as it is in life; all
+art that lives is full of sex. There is sex in "Pride and Prejudice";
+"Jane Eyre" and "Aurora Leigh" are full of sex; "Romola", "Daniel
+Deronda", and "Adam Bede" are sexless, and therefore lifeless. There
+is very little sex in George Sand's works, and they, too, have gone
+the way of sexless things. When I say that all art that lives is full
+of sex, I do not mean that the artist must have led a profligate life;
+I mean, indeed, the very opposite. George Sand's life was notoriously
+profligate, and her books tell the tale. I mean by sex that
+concentrated essence of life which the great artist jealously reserves
+for his art, and through which it pulsates. Shelley deserted his wife,
+but his thoughts never wandered far from Mary. Dante, according to
+recent discoveries, led a profligate life, while adoring Beatrice
+through interminable cantos. So profligacy is clearly not the word I
+want. I think that gallantry expresses my meaning better.
+
+The great artist and Don Juan are irreparably antagonistic; one cannot
+contain the other. Notwithstanding all the novels that have been
+written to prove the contrary, it is certain that woman occupies but a
+small place in the life of an artist. She is never more than a charm,
+a relaxation, in his life; and even when he strains her to his bosom,
+oceans are between them. Profligate, I am afraid, history proves the
+artist sometimes to have been, but his profligacy is only ephemeral
+and circumstantial; what is abiding in him is chastity of mind, though
+not always of body; his whole mind is given to his art, and all vague
+philanderings and sentimental musings are unknown to him; the women he
+knows and perceives are only food for it, and have no share in his
+mental life. And it is just because man can raise himself above the
+sentimental cravings of natural affection that his art is so
+infinitely higher than woman's art. "Man's love is from man's life a
+thing apart"--you know the quotation from Byron, "Tis woman's whole
+existence." The natural affections fill a woman's whole life, and her
+art is only so much sighing and gossiping about them. Very delightful
+and charming gossiping it often is--full of a sweetness and tenderness
+which we could not well spare, but always without force or dignity.
+
+In her art woman is always in evening dress: there are flowers in her
+hair, and her fan waves to and fro, and she wishes to sigh in the ear
+of him who sits beside her. Her mental nudeness is parallel with her
+low bodice, it is that and nothing more. She will make no sacrifice
+for her art; she will not tell the truth about herself as frankly as
+Jean-Jacques, nor will she observe life from the outside with the
+grave impersonal vision of Flaubert. In music women have done nothing,
+and in painting their achievement has been almost as slight. It is
+only in the inferior art--the art of acting--that women approach men.
+In that art it is not certain that they do not stand even higher.
+
+Whatever women have done in painting has been done in France. England
+produces countless thousands of lady artists; twenty Englishwomen
+paint for one Frenchwoman, but we have not yet succeeded in producing
+two that compare with Madame Lebrun and Madame Berthe Morisot. The
+only two Englishwomen who have in painting come prominently before the
+public are Angelica Kauffman and Lady Butler. The first-named had the
+good fortune to live in the great age, and though her work is
+individually feeble, it is stamped with the charm of the tradition out
+of which it grew and was fashioned. Moreover, she was content to
+remain a woman in her art. She imitated Sir Joshua Reynolds to the
+best of her ability, and did all in her power to induce him to marry
+her. How she could have shown more wisdom it is difficult to see. Lady
+Butler was not so fortunate, either in the date of her birth, in her
+selection of a master, or her manner of imitating him. Angelica
+imitated as a woman should. She carried the art of Sir Joshua across
+her fan; she arranged and adorned it with ribbons and sighs, and was
+content with such modest achievement.
+
+Lady Butler, however, thought she could do more than to sentimentalise
+with De Neuville's soldiers. She adopted his method, and from this
+same standpoint tried to do better; her attitude towards him was the
+same as Rosa Bonheur's towards Troyon; and the failure of Lady Butler
+was even greater than Rosa Bonheur's. But perhaps the best instance I
+could select to show how impossible it is for women to do more than to
+accept the themes invented by men, and to decorate and arrange them
+according to their pretty feminine fancies, is the collection of Lady
+Waterford's drawings now on exhibition at Lady Brownlow's house in
+Carlton House Terrace.
+
+Lady Waterford for many years--for more than a quarter of a
+century--has been spoken of as the one amateur of genius; and the
+greatest artists vied with each other as to which should pay the most
+extravagant homage to her talent. Mr. Watts seems to have distanced
+all competitors in praise of her, for in a letter of his quoted in the
+memoir prefixed to the catalogue, he says that she has exceeded all
+the great Venetian masters. It was nice of Mr. Watts to write such a
+letter; it was very foolish of Lady Brownlow to print it in the
+catalogue, for it serves no purpose except to draw attention to the
+obvious deficiencies of originality in Lady Waterford's drawings.
+Nearly all of them are remarkable for facile grouping; and the colour
+is rich, somewhat heavy, but generally harmonious; the drawing is
+painfully conventional; it would be impossible to find a hand, an arm,
+a face that has been tenderly observed and rendered with any personal
+feeling or passion.
+
+The cartoons are not better than any mediocre student of the
+Beaux-Arts could do--insipid parodies of the Venetian--whom she
+excels, according to Mr. Watts. When Lady Waterford attempted no more
+than a decorative ring of children dancing in a richly coloured
+landscape, or a group of harvesters seen against a rich decorative
+sky, such a design as might be brought across a fan, her talent is
+seen to best advantage; it is a fluent and facile talent, strangely
+unoriginal, but always sustained by taste acquired by long study of
+the Venetians, and by a superficial understanding of their genius.
+
+Many times superior to Lady Waterford is Miss Armstrong--a lady in
+whose drawings of children we perceive just that light tenderness and
+fanciful imagination which is not of our sex. Perhaps memory betrays
+me; it is a long while since I have seen Miss Armstrong's pastels, but
+my impression is that Miss Armstrong stands easily at the head of
+English lady artists--above Mrs. Swynnerton, whose resolute and
+distinguished talent was never more abundantly and strikingly
+manifested than in her picture entitled "Midsummer", now hanging in
+the New Gallery. "Midsummer" is a fine piece of intellectual painting,
+but it proceeds merely from the brain; there is hardly anything of the
+painter's nature in it; there are no surprising admissions in it; the
+painter never stood back abashed and asked herself if she should have
+confessed so much, if she should have told the world so much of what
+was passing in her intimate soul and flesh.
+
+Impersonality in art really means mediocrity. If you have nothing to
+tell about yourself, or if courage be lacking in you to tell the
+truth, you are not an artist. Are women without souls, or is it that
+they dare not reveal their souls unadorned with the laces and ribbons
+of convention? Their memoirs are a tissue of lies, suppressions, and
+half-truths. George Sand must fain suppress all mention of her Italian
+journey with Musset, a true account of which would have been an
+immortal story; but of hypocritical hare-hearted allusions Rousseau
+and Casanova were not made; in their memoirs women never get further
+than some slight fingering of laces; and in their novels they are too
+subject to their own natures to attain the perfect and complete
+realisation of self, which the so-called impersonal method alone
+affords. Women astonish us as much by their want of originality as
+they do by their extraordinary powers of assimilation. I am thinking
+now of the ladies who marry painters, and who, after a few years of
+married life, exhibit work identical in execution with that of their
+illustrious husbands--Mrs. E. M. Ward, Madame Fantin-Latour, Mrs.
+Swan, Mrs. Alma-Tadema. How interesting these households must be!
+Immediately after breakfast husband and wife sit down at their easels.
+"Let me mix a tone for you, dear," "I think I would put that up a
+little higher," etc. In a word, what Manet used to call _la peinture à
+quatre mains_.
+
+Nevertheless, among these well-intentioned ladies we find one artist
+of rare excellence--I mean Madame Lebrun. We all know her beautiful
+portrait of a woman walking forward, her hands in a muff. Seeing the
+engraving from a distance we might take it for a Romney; but when we
+approach, the quality of the painting visible through the engraving
+tells us that it belongs to the French school. In design the portrait
+is strangely like a Romney; it is full of all that brightness and
+grace, and that feminine refinement, which is a distinguishing
+characteristic of his genius, and which was especially impressed on my
+memory by the portrait of the lady in the white dress walking forward,
+her hands in front of her, the slight fingers pressed one against the
+other, exhibited this year in the exhibition of Old Masters in the
+Academy.
+
+But if we deny that the portrait of the lady with the muff affords
+testimony as to the sex of the painter, we must admit that none but a
+woman could have conceived the portrait which Madame Lebrun painted of
+herself and her little daughter. The painting may be somewhat dry and
+hard, it certainly betrays none of the fluid nervous tendernesses and
+graces of the female temperament; but surely none but a woman and a
+mother could have designed that original and expressive composition;
+it was a mother who found instinctively that touching and expressive
+movement--the mother's arms circled about her little daughter's
+waist, the little girl leaning forward, her face resting on her
+mother's shoulder. Never before did artist epitomise in a gesture all
+the familiar affection and simple persuasive happiness of home; the
+very atmosphere of an embrace is in this picture. And in this picture
+the painter reveals herself to us in one of the intimate moments of
+her daily life, the tender, wistful moment when a mother receives her
+growing girl in her arms, the adolescent girl having run she knows not
+why to her mother. These two portraits, both in the Louvre, are, I
+regret to say, the only pictures of Madame Lebrun that I am acquainted
+with. But I doubt if my admiration would be increased by a wider
+knowledge of her work. She seems to have said everything she had to
+say in these two pictures.
+
+Madame Lebrun painted well, but she invented nothing, she failed to
+make her own of any special manner of seeing and rendering things; she
+failed to create a style. Only one woman did this, and that woman is
+Madame Morisot, and her pictures are the only pictures painted by a
+woman that could not be destroyed without creating a blank, a hiatus
+in the history of art. True that the hiatus would be slight--
+insignificant if you will--but the insignificant is sometimes
+dear to us; and though nightingales, thrushes, and skylarks were to
+sing in King's Bench Walk, I should miss the individual chirp of the
+pretty sparrow.
+
+Madame Morisot's note is perhaps as insignificant as a sparrow's, but
+it is as unique and as individual a note. She has created a style, and
+has done so by investing her art with all her femininity; her art is
+no dull parody of ours: it is all womanhood--sweet and gracious,
+tender and wistful womanhood. Her first pictures were painted under
+the influence of Corot, and two of these early works were hung in the
+exhibition of her works held the other day at Goupil's, Boulevard
+Montmartre. The more important was, I remember, a view of Paris seen
+from a suburb--a green railing and two loitering nursemaids in the
+foreground, the middle of the picture filled with the city faintly
+seen and faintly glittering in the hour of the sun's decline, between
+four and six. It was no disagreeable or ridiculous parody of Corot; it
+was Corot feminised, Corot reflected in a woman's soul, a woman's love
+of man's genius, a lake-reflected moon. But Corot's influence did not
+endure. Through her sister's marriage Madame Morisot came in contact
+with Manet, and she was quick to recognise him as being the greatest
+artist that France had produced since Delacroix.
+
+Henceforth she never faltered in her allegiance to the genius of her
+great brother-in-law. True, that she attempted no more than to carry
+his art across her fan; but how adorably she did this! She got from
+him that handling out of which the colour flows joyous and bright as
+well-water, the handling that was necessary for the realisation of
+that dream of hers, a light world afloat in an irradiation--light
+trembling upon the shallows of artificial water, where swans and
+aquatic birds are plunging, and light skiffs are moored; light turning
+the summer trees to blue; light sleeping a soft and lucid sleep in the
+underwoods; light illumining the green summer of leaves where the
+diamond rain is still dripping; light transforming into jewellery the
+happy flight of bees and butterflies. Her swans are not diagrams drawn
+upon the water, their whiteness appears and disappears in the
+trembling of the light; and the underwood, how warm and quiet it is,
+and penetrated with the life of the summer; and the yellow-painted
+skiff, how happy and how real! Colours, tints of faint green and mauve
+passed lightly, a few branches indicated. Truly, the art of Manet
+_transporté en éventail_.
+
+A brush that writes rather than paints, that writes exquisite notes in
+the sweet seduction of a perfect epistolary style, notes written in a
+boudoir, notes of invitation, sometimes confessions of love, the whole
+feminine heart trembling as a hurt bird trembles in a man's hand. And
+here are yachts and blue water, the water full of the blueness of the
+sky; and the confusion of masts and rigging is perfectly indicated
+without tiresome explanation! The colour is deep and rich, for the
+values have been truly observed; and the pink house on the left is an
+exquisite note. No deep solutions, an art afloat and adrift upon the
+canvas, as a woman's life floats on the surface of life. "My
+sister-in-law would not have existed without me," I remember Manet
+saying to me in one of the long days we spent together in the Rue
+d'Amsterdam. True, indeed, that she would not have existed without
+him; and yet she has something that he has not--the charm of an
+exquisite feminine fancy, the charm of her sex. Madame Morisot is the
+eighteenth century quick with the nineteenth; she is the nineteenth
+turning her eyes regretfully looking back on the eighteenth.
+
+Chaplin parodied the eighteenth century; in Madame Morisot something
+of its gracious spirit naturally resides; she is eighteenth century
+especially in her drawings; they are fluent and flowing; nowhere do we
+detect a measurement taken, they are free of tricks--that is to say of
+ignorance assuming airs of learning. That red chalk drawing of a naked
+girl, how simple, loose, and unaffected, how purged of the odious
+erudition of the modern studio. And her precious and natural
+remembrance of the great century, with all its love of youth and the
+beauties of youthful lines, is especially noticeable in the red chalk
+drawing of the girl wearing a bonnet, the veil falling and hiding her
+beautiful eyes. As I stood lost in admiration of this drawing, I heard
+a rough voice behind me: "C'est bien beau, n'est pas?" It was Claude
+Monet. "Yes, isn't it superb?" I answered. "I wonder how much they'll
+sell it for." "I'll soon find out that," said Monet, and turning to
+the attendant he asked the question.
+
+"Pour vous, sept cents cinquante francs."
+
+"C'est bien; il est à moi."
+
+This anecdote will give a better idea of the value of Berthe Morisot
+than seventy columns of mine or any other man's criticism.
+
+
+
+
+MR. STEER'S EXHIBITION.
+
+1892.
+
+
+Before sitting down to paint a landscape the artist must make up his
+mind whether he is going to use the trees, meadows, streams, and
+mountains before him as subject-matter for a decoration in the manner
+of the Japanese, or whether he will take them as subject-matter for
+the expression of a human emotion in the manner of Wilson and Millet.
+I offer no opinion which is the higher and which is the lower road;
+they may be wide apart, they may draw very close together, they may
+overlap so that it is difficult to say along which the artist is
+going; but, speaking roughly, there are but two roads, and it is
+necessary that the artist should choose between them. But this point
+has been fully discussed elsewhere, and I only allude to it here
+because I wish to assure my readers that Mr. Steer's exhibition is not
+"Folkestone at low tide" and "Folkestone at high tide".
+
+In all the criticisms I have seen of the present exhibition it has
+been admitted that Mr. Steer takes a foremost place in what is known
+as the modern movement. I also noticed that it was admitted that Mr.
+Steer is a born artist. The expression, from constant use, has lost
+its true significance; yet to find another phrase that would express
+the idea more explicitly would be difficult; the born artist, meaning
+the man in whom feeling and expression are one.
+
+The growth of a work of art is as inexplicable as that of a flower. We
+know that there are men who feel deeply and who understand clearly
+what a work of art should be; but when they attempt to create, their
+efforts are abortive. Their ideas, their desires, their intentions,
+their plans, are excellent; but the passage between the brain and the
+canvas, between the brain and the sheet of paper, is full of
+shipwrecking reefs, and the intentions of these men do not correspond
+in the least with their execution. Noticing our blank faces, they
+explain their ideas in front of their works. They meant this, they
+meant that. Inwardly we answer, "All you say is most interesting; but
+why didn't you put all that into your picture, into your novel?"
+
+Then Mr. Steer is not an abortive genius, for his ideas do not come to
+utter shipwreck in the perilous passage; they often lose a spar or
+two, they sometimes appear in a more or less dismantled condition, but
+they retain their masts; they come in with some yards of canvas still
+set, and the severest criticism that can be passed on them is, "With a
+little better luck that would have been a very fine thing indeed." And
+not infrequently Mr. Steer's pictures correspond very closely with the
+mental conception in which they originated; sometimes little or
+nothing has been lost as the idea passed from the brain to the canvas,
+and it is on account of these pictures that we say that Mr. Steer is a
+born artist. This once granted, the question arises: is this born
+artist likewise a great artist--will he formulate his sensation, and
+give us a new manner of feeling and seeing, or will he merely succeed
+in painting some beautiful pictures when circumstances and the mood of
+the moment combine in his favour? This is a question which all who
+visit the exhibition of this artist's work, now on view in the Goupil
+Galleries, will ask themselves. They will ask if this be the furthest
+limit to which he may go, or if he will discover a style entirely his
+own which will enable him to convey all his sensation of life upon the
+canvas.
+
+That Mr. Steer's drawing does not suggest a future draughtsman seems
+to matter little, for we remember that colour, and not form, is the
+impulse that urges and inspires him. Mr. Steer draws well enough to
+take a high place if he can overcome more serious defects. His
+greatest peril seems to me to be an uncontrollable desire to paint in
+the style of the last man whose work has interested him. At one time
+it was only in his most unguarded moments that he could see a
+landscape otherwise than as Monet saw it; a year or two later it was
+Whistler who dictated certain schemes of colour, certain harmonious
+arrangements of black; and the most distressing symptom of all is that
+Mr. Brabazon could not hold an exhibition of some very nice tints of
+rose and blue without inspiring Mr. Steer to go and swish water-colour
+about in the same manner. Mr. Steer has the defect of his qualities;
+his perceptions are naïve: and just as he must have thought seven
+years ago that all modern landscape-painters must be more or less like
+Monet, he must have thought last summer that all modern water-colour
+must be more or less like Mr. Brabazon. This is doubly unfortunate,
+because Mr. Steer is only good when he is Steer, and nothing but
+Steer.
+
+How much we should borrow, and how we should borrow, are questions
+which will agitate artists for all time. It is certain, however, that
+one of the most certain signs of genius is the power to take from
+others and to assimilate. How much did Rubens take from Titian? How
+much did Mr. Whistler take from the Japanese? Almost everything in Mr.
+Whistler already existed in art. In the National Gallery the white
+stocking in the Philip reminds us of the white stockings in the
+portrait of Miss Alexander. In the British Museum we find the shadows
+that he transferred from Rembrandt to his own etchings. Degas took his
+drawing from Ingres and his colour--that lovely brown!--from Poussin.
+But, notwithstanding their vast borrowings, Rubens is always Rubens,
+Whistler is always Whistler, and Degas is always Degas. Alexander took
+a good deal, too, but he too remained always Alexander. We must
+conquer what we take. But what Mr. Steer takes often conquers him; he
+is often like one suffering from a weak digestion, he cannot
+assimilate. I must except, however, that very beautiful picture, "Two
+Yachts lying off Cowes". Under a deepening sky of mauve the yachts
+lie, their lights and rigging showing through the twilight. We may say
+that this picture owes something to Mr. Whistler; but the debt is not
+distressing; it does not strike the eye; it does not prevent us from
+seeing the picture--a very beautiful piece of decoration in a high key
+of colour--a picture which it would be difficult to find fault with.
+It is without fault; the intention of the artist was a beautiful one,
+and it has been completely rendered. I like quite as well "The Casino,
+Boulogne", the property, I note with some interest, of Mr. Humphry
+Ward, art critic of the _Times_. Mr. Humphry Ward must write
+conventional commonplace, otherwise he could not remain art critic of
+the _Times_, so it is pleasant to find that he is withal an excellent
+judge of a picture. The picture, I suppose, in a very remote and
+distant way, may be said to be in the style of Wilson. Again a
+successful assimilation. The buildings stand high up, they are piled
+high up in the picture, and a beautiful blue envelops sky, sea, and
+land. Nos. 1 and 2 show Mr. Steer at his best: that beautiful blue,
+that beautiful mauve, is the optimism of painting. Such colour is to
+the colourist what the drug is to the opium-eater: nothing matters,
+the world is behind us, and we dream on and on, lost in an infinity of
+suggestion. This quality, which, for want of a better expression, I
+call the optimism of painting, is a peculiar characteristic of Mr.
+Steer's work. We find it again in "Children Paddling". Around the long
+breakwater the sea winds, filling the estuary, or perchance recedes,
+for the incoming tide is noisier; a delicious, happy, opium blue, the
+blue of oblivion.... Paddling in the warm sea-water gives oblivion to
+those children. They forget their little worries in the sensation of
+sea and sand, as I forget mine in that dreamy blue which fades and
+deepens imperceptibly, like a flower from the intense heart to the
+delicate edge of the petals.
+
+The vague sea is drawn up behind the breakwater, and out of it the
+broad sky ascends solemnly in curves like palms. Happy sensation of
+daylight; a flower-like afternoon; little children paddling; the world
+is behind them; they are as flowers, and are conscious only of the
+benedictive influences of sand and sea and sky.
+
+The exhibition contains nearly every description of work: full-length
+portraits in oil, life-size heads, eight-inch panels, and some
+half-dozen water-colours. A little girl in a starched white frock is a
+charming picture, and the large picture entitled "The Sofa" is a most
+distinguished piece of work, full of true pictorial feeling. Mr. Steer
+is never common or vulgar; he is distinguished even when he fails. "A
+Girl in a Large Hat" is a picture which became my property some three
+or four months ago. Since then I have seen it every day, and I like it
+better and better. That hat is so well placed in the canvas; the
+expression of the face and body, are they not perfect? What an air of
+resignation, of pensiveness, this picture exhales! The jacket is done
+with a few touches, but they are sufficient, for they are in their
+right places. And the colour! Hardly do you find any, and yet there is
+an effect of colour which few painters could attain when they had
+exhausted all the resources of the palette.
+
+
+
+
+CLAUDE MONET.
+
+
+Whether the pictures in the Royal Academy be bad or good, the
+journalist must describe them. The public goes to the Academy, and the
+journalist must follow the traffic, like the omnibuses. But the
+public, the English public, does not go to the Salon or to the Champ
+de Mars. Why, then, should our newspapers waste space on the
+description of pictures which not one reader in fifty has seen or will
+see? I suppose the demon of actuality is answerable for the wasted
+columns, and the demon of habit for my yearly wanderings over deserts
+of cocoa-nut matting, under tropical skylights, in continual torment
+from glaring oil-paintings. Of the days I have spent in those
+exhibitions, nothing remains but the memory of discomfort, and the
+sense of relief experienced on coming to a room in which there were no
+pictures. Ah, the arm-chairs into which I slipped and the tapestries
+that rested my jaded eyes! ... So this year I resolved to break with
+habit and to visit neither the Salon nor the Champ de Mars. An art
+critic I am, but surely independent of pictures--at least, of modern
+pictures; indeed, they stand between me and the interesting article
+ninety times in a hundred.
+
+Only now and then do we meet a modern artist about whom we may
+rhapsodise, or at whom we may curse: Claude Monet is surely such an
+one. So I pricked up my ears when I heard there was an exhibition of
+his work at Durand Ruel's. I felt I was on the trail of an interesting
+article, and away I went. The first time I pondered and argued with
+myself. Then I went with an intelligent lady, and was garrulous,
+explanatory, and theoretical; she listened, and said she would write
+out all I had said from her point of view. The third time I went with
+two artists. We were equally garrulous and argumentative, and with the
+result that we three left the exhibition more than ever confirmed in
+the truth of our opinions. I mention these facts, not, as the
+ill-natured might suppose, because it pleases me to write about my own
+sayings and doings, but because I believe my conduct to be typical of
+the conduct of hundreds of others in regard to the present exhibition
+in the Rue Laffitte; for, let this be said in Monet's honour: every
+day artists from every country in Europe go there by themselves, with
+their women friends, and with other artists, and every day since the
+exhibition opened, the galleries have been the scene of passionate
+discussion.
+
+My own position regarding Monet is a peculiar one, and I give it for
+what it is worth. It is about eighteen years since I first made the
+acquaintance of this remarkable man. Though at first shocked, I was
+soon convinced of his talent, and set myself about praising him as
+well as I knew how. But my prophesying was answered by scoffs, jeers,
+supercilious smiles. Outside of the Café of the Nouvelle Athènes,
+Monet was a laughing-stock. Manet was bad enough; but when it came to
+Monet, words were inadequate to express sufficient contempt. A shrug
+of the shoulders or a pitying look, which clearly meant, "Art thou
+most of madman or simpleton, or, maybe, impudent charlatan who would
+attract attention to himself by professing admiration for such
+eccentricity?"
+
+It was thus eighteen years ago; but revolution has changed depth to
+height, and Monet is now looked upon as the creator of the art of
+landscape painting; before him nothing was, after him nothing can be,
+for he has said all things and made the advent of another painter
+impossible, inconceivable. He who could never do a right thing can now
+do no wrong one. Canvases beside which the vaguest of Mr. Whistler's
+nocturnes are clear statements of plain fact, lilac-coloured canvases
+void of design or tone, or quality of paint, are accepted by a
+complacent public, and bought by American millionaires for vast sums;
+and the early canvases about which Paris would not once tolerate a
+word of praise, are now considered old-fashioned. My personal concern
+in all this enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the fashionable
+market-place--is that I once more find myself a dissident, and a
+dissident in a very small minority. I think of Monet now as I thought
+of him eighteen years ago. For no moment did it seem to me possible to
+think of him as an equal of Corot or of Millet. He seemed a painter of
+great talent, of exceptional dexterity of hand, and of clear and rapid
+vision. His vision seemed then somewhat impersonal; the temper of his
+mind did not illuminate his pictures; he was a marvellous mirror,
+reproducing all the passing phenomena of Nature; and that was all. And
+looking at his latest work, his views of Rouen Cathedral, it seems to
+me that he has merely continued to develop the qualities for which we
+first admired him--clearness of vision and a marvellous technical
+execution. So extraordinary is this later execution that, by
+comparison, the earlier seems timid and weak. His naturalism has
+expanded and strengthened: mine has decayed and almost fallen from me.
+
+Monet's handicraft has grown like a weed; it now overtops and chokes
+the idea; it seems in these façades to exist by itself, like a
+monstrous and unnatural ivy, independent of support; and when
+expression outruns the thought, it ceases to charm. We admire the
+marvellous mastery with which Monet drew tower and portico: see that
+tower lifted out of blue haze, no delicacy of real perspective has
+been omitted; see that portico bathed in sunlight and shadow, no form
+of ornament has been slurred; but we are fain of some personal sense
+of beauty, we miss that rare delicacy of perception which delights us
+in Mr. Whistler's "Venice", and in Guardi's vision of cupolas,
+stairways, roofs, gondolas, and waterways. Monet sees clearly, and he
+sees truly, but does he see beautifully? is his an enchanted vision?
+And is not every picture that fails to move, to transport, to enchant,
+a mistake?
+
+A work of art is complete in itself. But is any one of these pictures
+complete in itself? Is not the effect they produce dependent on the
+number, and may not this set of pictures be compared to a set of
+scenes in a theatre, the effect of which is attained by combination?
+There is no foreground in them; the cathedral is always in the first
+plane, directly, under the eye of the spectator, the wall running out
+of the picture. The spectator says, "What extraordinary power was
+necessary to paint twelve views of that cathedral without once having
+recourse to the illusion of distance!" A feat no doubt it was; and
+therein we perceive the artistic weakness of the pictures. For art
+must not be confounded with the strong man in the fair who straddles,
+holding a full-grown woman on the palm of his hand.
+
+Then the question of the quality of paint. Manet's paint was beautiful
+as that of an old master; brilliant as an enamel, smooth as an old
+ivory. But the quality of paint in Monet is that of stone and mortar.
+It would seem (the thought is too monstrous to be entertained) as if
+he had striven by thickness of paint and roughness of the handling to
+reproduce the very material quality of the stonework. This would be
+realism _à outrance_. I will not think that Monet was haunted for a
+single instant by so shameful a thought. However this may be, the fact
+remains that a _trompe-l'oeil_ has been achieved, and four inches of
+any one of these pictures looked at separately would be mistaken by
+sight and touch for a piece of stonework. In another picture, in a
+haystack with the sun shining on it, the _trompe-l'oeil_ has again
+been as cleverly achieved as by the most cunning of scene-painters. So
+the haystack is a popular delight.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES.
+
+
+MR. MARK FISHER.
+
+Mark Fisher is a nineteenth-century Morland; the disposition of mind
+and character of vision seem the same in both painters, the outlook
+almost identical: the same affectionate interest in humble life, the
+same power of apprehending the pathos of work, the same sympathy for
+the life that thinks not. But beyond these qualities of mind common to
+both painters, Morland possessed a sense of beauty and grace which is
+absent in Mark Fisher. Morland's pig-styes are more beautifully seen
+than Mark Fisher could see them. But is the sense of beauty, which was
+most certainly Morland's, so inherent and independent a possession
+that we must regard it as his rather than the common inheritance of
+those who lived in his time? Surely Mark Fisher would have seen more
+beautifully if he had lived in the eighteenth century? Or, to put the
+case more clearly, surely Morland would have seen very much as Mark
+Fisher sees if he had lived in the nineteenth? Think of the work done
+by Morland in the field and farmyard--it is in that work that he
+lives; compare it with Mark Fisher's, subtracting, of course, all that
+Morland owed to his time, quality of paint, and a certain easy sense
+of beauty, and say if you can that both men do not stand on the same
+intellectual plane.
+
+To tell the story of the life of the fields, and to tell it sincerely,
+without false sentiment, was their desire; nor do we detect in either
+Morland or Mark Fisher any pretence of seeing more in their subjects
+than is natural for them to see: in Jacques, yes. Jacques tried to
+think profoundly, like Millet; Mark Fisher does not; nor was Morland
+influenced by the caustic mind of Hogarth to satirise the animalism of
+the boors he painted. He saw rural life with the same kindly eyes as
+Mark Fisher. The difference between the two men is a difference of
+means, of expression--I mean the exterior envelope in which the work
+of the mind lives, and which preserves and assures a long life to the
+painter. On this point no comparison is possible between the
+eighteenth and nineteenth century painter. We should seek in vain in
+Mark Fisher for Morland's beautiful smooth painting, for his fluent
+and easy drawing, the complete and easy vehicle of his vision of
+things. Mark Fisher draws well, but he often draws awkwardly; he
+possesses the sentiment of proportion and the instinct of anatomy; we
+admire the sincerity and we recognise the truth, but we miss the charm
+of that easy and perfect expression which was current in Morland's
+time. Mark Fisher is a man who has something to say and who says it in
+a somewhat barbarous manner. He dreams hardly at all, his thoughts are
+ordinary, and are only saved from commonplace by his absence of
+affectation. He is not without sentiment, but his sentiment is a
+little plain. His hand is his worst enemy; the touch is seldom
+interesting or beautiful.
+
+I said that Morland saw nature with the same kindly eyes as Mark
+Fisher. I would have another word on that point. Mark Fisher's
+painting is optimistic. His skies are blue, his sunlight dozes in the
+orchard, his chestnut trees are in bloom. The melodrama of nature
+never appears in his pictures; his lanes and fields reflect a gentle
+mind that has found happiness in observing the changes of the seasons.
+Happy Mark Fisher! An admirable painter, the best, the only
+landscape-painter of our time; the one who continues the tradition of
+Potter and Morland, and lives for his art, uninfluenced by the clamour
+of cliques.
+
+
+A PORTRAIT BY MR. SARGENT.
+
+Mr. Sargent has painted the portrait of a beautiful woman and of a
+beautiful drawing-room; the picture is full of technical
+accomplishment. But is it a beautiful picture?
+
+She is dressed in cherry-coloured velvet, and she sits on the edge of
+a Louis XV. sofa, one arm by her side, the other thrown a little
+behind her, the hand leaning against the sofa. Behind her are pale
+yellow draperies, and under her feet is an Aubasson carpet. The
+drawing is swift, certain, and complete. The movement of the arm is so
+well rendered that we know the exact pressure of the long fingers that
+melt into a padded silken sofa. But is the drawing distinguished, or
+subtle, or refined? or is it mere parade of knowledge and practice of
+hand? The face charms us with its actuality; but is there a touch
+intimately characteristic of the model? or is it merely a vivacious
+appearance?
+
+But if the drawing when judged by the highest standard fails to
+satisfy us, what shall be said of the colour? Think of a
+cherry-coloured velvet filling half the picture--the pale cherry pink
+known as cerise--with mauve lights, and behind it pale yellowish
+draperies and an Aubasson carpet under the lady's feet. Of course this
+is very "daring", but is it anything more? Is the colour deep and
+sonorous, like Alfred Stevens' red velvets; or is it thin and harsh,
+like Duran? Has any attempt been made to compose the colour, to carry
+it through the picture? There are a few touches of red in the carpet,
+none in the draperies, so the dress is practically a huge splash
+transferred from nature to the canvas. And when we ask ourselves if
+the picture has style, is not the answer: It is merely the apotheosis
+of fashionable painting? It is what Messrs. Shannon, Hacker, and
+Solomon would like to do, but what they cannot do. Mr. Sargent has
+realised their dreams for them; he has told us what the new generation
+of Academicians want, he has revealed their souls' desire, and it
+is--_l'article de Paris._
+
+The portrait is therefore a prodigious success; to use an expression
+which will be understood in the studios, "it knocks the walls silly";
+you see nothing else in the gallery; and it wins the suffrages of the
+artists and the public alike. Duran never drew so fluently as that,
+nor was he ever capable of so pictorial an intention. Chaplin, for it
+recalls Chaplin, was always heavier, more conventional; above all,
+less real. For it is very real, and just the reality that ladies like,
+reality without grossness; in other words, without criticism. So Mr.
+Sargent gets his public, as the saying goes, "all round". He gets the
+ladies, because it realises the ideal they have formed of themselves;
+he gets the artists, because it is the realisation of the pictorial
+ideals of the present day.
+
+The picture has been described as marvellous, brilliant, astonishing,
+superb, but no one has described it as beautiful. Whether because of
+the commonness of the epithet, or because every one felt that
+beautiful was not the adjective that expressed the sensation the
+picture awoke in him, I know not. It is essentially a picture of the
+hour; it fixes the idea of the moment and reminds one somewhat of a
+_première_ at the Vaudeville with Sarah in a new part. Every one is on
+the _qui vive_. The _salle_ is alive with murmurs of approbation. It
+is the joy of the passing hour, the delirium of the sensual present.
+The appeal is the same as that of food and drink and air and love. But
+when painters are pursuing new ideals, when all that constitutes the
+appearance of our day has changed, I fear that many will turn with a
+shudder from its cold, material accomplishment.
+
+
+AN ORCHID BY MR. JAMES.
+
+A Kensington Museum student would have drawn that flower carefully
+with a lead pencil; it would be washed with colour and stippled until
+it reached the quality of wool, which is so much admired in that art
+training-school; and whenever the young lady was not satisfied with
+the turn her work was taking, she would wash the displeasing portion
+out and start afresh. The difference--there are other differences
+--but the difference we are concerned with between this hypothetical
+young person of Kensington education and Mr. James, is that the
+drawing which Mr. James exhibits is not a faithful record of all the
+difficulties that are met with in painting an orchid. A hundred
+orchids preceded the orchid on the wall--some were good in colour and
+failed in drawing, and _vice versâ_. Others were excellent in drawing
+and colour, but the backgrounds did not come out right. All these were
+destroyed. That mauve and grey orchid was probably not even sketched
+in with a lead pencil. Mr. James desired an uninterrupted expression
+of its beauty: to first sketch it with a pencil would be to lose
+something of his first vividness of impression. It must flow straight
+out of the brush. But to attain such fluency it was necessary to paint
+that orchid a hundred times before its form and colour were learnt
+sufficiently to admit of the expression of all the flower's beauty in
+one painting. It is not that Mr. James has laboured less but ten times
+more than the Kensington student. But all the preliminary labour
+having been discarded, it seems as simple and as slight a thing as may
+be--a flower in a glass, the flower drawn only in its essentials, the
+glass faintly indicated, a flowing tint of mauve dissolving to grey,
+the red heart of the flower for the centre of interest. A decoration
+for where? I imagine it in a boudoir whose walls are stretched and
+whose windows are curtained with grey silk. From the ceiling hangs a
+chandelier, cut glass--pure Louis XV. The furniture that I see is
+modern; but here and there a _tabouret_, a _guéridon_, or a delicate
+_étagère_, filled with tiny volumes of Musset and two or three rare
+modern writers, recall the eighteenth century. And who sits in this
+delicate boudoir perfumed with a faint scent, a sachet-scented
+pocket-handkerchief? Surely one of Sargent's ladies. Perhaps the lady
+in the shot-silk dress who sat on an eighteenth-century French sofa
+two years ago in the Academy, her tiny, plump, curved white hand,
+drawn as well in its interior as in exterior limits, hanging over the
+gilt arm of the sofa. But she sits now, in the boudoir I have
+imagined, in a low arm-chair covered with grey silk; her feet lie one
+over the other on the long-haired rug; the fire burns low in the
+grate, and the soft spring sunlight laps through the lace curtains,
+filling the room with a bland, moody, retrospective atmosphere. She
+sits facing Mr. James's water-colour. She is looking at it, she does
+not see it; her thoughts are far away, and their importance is slight.
+
+
+THE WHISTLER ALBUM.
+
+The photograph of the portrait of Miss Alexander is as suggestive of
+the colour as a pianoforte arrangement of _Tristan_ is of the
+orchestration. The sounds of the different instruments come through
+the thin tinkle of the piano just as the colour of the blond hair, the
+delicate passages of green-grey and green, come through the black and
+white of the photograph. Truly a beautiful thing! But "Before the
+Mirror" reflects perhaps a deeper beauty. The influence of that
+strange man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is sufficiently plain in this
+picture. He who could execute hardly at all in paint, and whose verse
+is Italian, though the author wrote and spoke no language but English,
+foisted the character of his genius upon all the poetry and painting
+of his generation. It is as present in this picture as it is in
+Swinburne's first volume of Poems and Ballads. Mr. Whistler took the
+type of woman and the sentiment of the picture from Rossetti; he saw
+that even in painting Rossetti had something to say, and, lest an
+artistic thought should be lost to the world through inadequate
+expression, he painted this picture. He did not go on painting
+pictures in the Rossetti sentiment, because he thought he had
+exhausted Rossetti in one picture. In this he was possibly mistaken,
+but the large, white, indolent shoulders, misshapen, almost grotesque
+in original Rossettis, are here in beautiful prime and plenitude; the
+line of the head and neck, the hair falling over the stooped shoulder
+--a sensuous dream it is; all her body's beauty, to borrow a phrase
+from Rossetti, is in that white dress; and the beauty of the arm in
+its full white sleeve lies along the white chimney-piece, the fingers
+languidly open: two fallen over the edge, two touching the blue vase.
+Note how beautiful is the placing of this figure in the picture; how
+the golden head shines, high up in the right-hand corner, and the
+white dress and white-sleeved arms fill the picture with an exquisite
+music of proportion. The dress cuts against the black grate, and the
+angle of black is the very happiest; it is brightened with pink sprays
+of azaleas, and they seem to whisper the very enchanted bloom of their
+life into the picture. Never did Dutch or Japanese artist paint
+flowers like these. And the fluent music of the painting seems only to
+enforce the languor and reverie which this canvas exhales: the languor
+of white dress and gold hair; languor and golden reverie float in the
+mirror like a sunset in placid waters. The profile in full light is
+thrilled with grief of present hours; the full face half lost in
+shadow, far away--a ghost of a dead self--is dreaming with half-closed
+eyes, unmindful of what may be. By her mirror, gowned in white as if
+for dreams, she watches life flowing past her, and she knows of no use
+to make of it.
+
+
+INGRES.
+
+Raphael was a great designer, but there are a purity and a passion in
+Ingres' line for the like of which we have to go back to the Greeks.
+Apelles could not have realised more exquisite simplifications, could
+not have dreamed into any of his lost works a purer soul of beauty
+than Ingres did into the head, arms, and torso of "La Source". The
+line that floats about the muscles of an arm is illusive, evanescent,
+as an evening-tinted sky; and none except the Greeks and Ingres have
+attained such mystery of line: not Raphael, not even Michael Angelo in
+the romantic anatomies of his stupendous creations. Ingres was a
+Frenchman animated by the soul of an ancient Greek, an ancient Greek
+who lost himself in Japan. There is as much mystery in Ingres' line as
+in Rembrandt's light and shade. The arms and wrists and hands of the
+lady seated among the blue cushions in the Louvre are as illusive as
+any one of Mr. Whistler's "Nocturnes". The beautiful "Andromeda", head
+and throat leaned back almost out of nature, wild eyes and mass of
+heavy hair, long white arms uplifted, chained to the basalt,--how rare
+the simplifications, those arms, that body, the straight flanks and
+slender leg advancing,--are made of lines simple and beautiful as
+those which in the Venus of Milo realise the architectural beauty of
+woman. We shrink from such comparison, for perforce we see that the
+grandeur of the Venus is not in the Andromeda: but in both is the same
+quality of beauty. In the drawing for the odalisque, in her long back,
+wonderful as a stem of woodbine, there is the very same love of form
+which a Greek expressed with the benign ease of a god speaking his
+creation through the harmonious universe.
+
+But the pure, unconscious love of form, inherited from the Greeks,
+sometimes turned to passion in Ingres: not in "La Source", she is
+wholly Greek; but in the beautiful sinuous back of the odalisque we
+perceive some of the exasperation of nerves which betrays our century.
+If Phidias' sketches had come down to us, the margin filled with his
+hesitations, we should know more of his intimate personality. You
+notice, my dear reader, how intolerant I am of criticism of my idol,
+how I repudiate any slight suggestion of imperfection, how I turn upon
+myself and defend my god. Before going to bed, I often stand, candle
+in hand, before the Roman lady and enumerate the adorable perfections
+of the drawing. I am aware of my weakness, I have pleaded guilty to an
+idolatrous worship, but, if I have expressed myself as I intended, my
+great love will seem neither vain nor unreasonable. For surely for
+quality of beautiful line this man stands nearer to the Greeks than
+any other.
+
+
+
+
+SOME JAPANESE PRINTS.
+
+
+"Ladies Under Trees". Not Japanese ladies walking under Japanese
+trees--that is to say, trees peculiar to Japan, planted and fashioned
+according to the mode of Japan--but merely ladies walking under trees.
+True that the costumes are Japanese, the writing on the wall is in
+Japanese characters, the umbrellas and the idol on the tray are
+Japanese; universality is not attained by the simple device of
+dressing the model in a sheet and eliminating all accessories that
+might betray time and country; the great artist accepts the costume of
+his time and all the special signs of his time, and merely by the
+lovely exercise of genius the mere accidents of a generation become
+the symbolic expression of universal sensation and lasting truths. Do
+not ask me how this transformation is effected; it is the secret of
+every great artist, a secret which he exercises unconsciously, and
+which no critic has explained.
+
+Looking at this yard of coloured print, I ask myself how it is that
+ever since art began no such admirable result has been obtained with
+means so slight. A few outlines drawn with pen and ink or pencil, and
+the interspaces filled in with two flat tints-a dark green, and a grey
+verging on mauve.
+
+The drawing of the figures is marvellously beautiful. But why is it
+beautiful? Is it because of the individual character represented in
+the faces? The faces are expressed by means of a formula, and are as
+like one another as a row of eggs. Are the proportions of the figure
+correctly measured, and are the anatomies well understood? The figures
+are in the usual proportions so far as the number of heads is
+concerned: they are all from six and a half to seven heads high; but
+no motion of limbs happens under the draperies, and the hands and
+feet, like the faces, are expressed by a set of arbitrary conventions.
+It is not even easy to determine whether the posture of the woman on
+the right is intended for sitting or kneeling. She holds a tray, on
+which is an idol, and to provide sufficient balance for the
+composition the artist has placed a yellow umbrella in the idol's
+hand. Examine this design from end to end, and nowhere will you find
+any desire to imitate nature. With a line Utamaro expresses all that
+he deems it necessary to express of a face's contour. Three or four
+conventional markings stand for eyes, mouth, and ears; no desire to
+convey the illusion of a rounded surface disturbed his mind for a
+moment; the intention of the Japanese artists was merely to decorate a
+surface with line and colour. It was no part of their scheme to
+compete with nature, so it could not occur to them to cover one side
+of a face with shadow. The Japanese artists never thought to deceive;
+the art of deception they left to their conjurers. The Japanese artist
+thought of harmony, not of accuracy of line, and of harmony, not of
+truth of colour; it was therefore impossible for him to entertain the
+idea of shading his drawings, and had some one whispered the idea to
+him he would have answered: "The frame will always tell people that
+they are not looking at nature. You would have it all heavy and black,
+but I want something light, and bright, and full of beauty. See these
+lines, are they not in themselves beautiful? are they not sharp,
+clear, and flowing, according to the necessity of the composition? Are
+not the grey and the dark green sufficiently contrasted? do they not
+bring to your eyes a sense of repose and unity? Look at the
+embroideries on the dresses, are they not delicate? do not the
+star-flowers come in the right place? is not the yellow in harmony
+with the grey and the green? And the blossoms on the trees, are they
+not touched in with the lightness of hand and delicacy of tone that
+you desire? Step back and see if the spots of colour and the effects
+of line become confused, or if they still hold their places from a
+distance as well as close...."
+
+Ladies under trees, by Utamaro! That grey-green design alternated with
+pale yellow corresponds more nearly to a sonata by Mozart than to
+anything else; both are fine decorations, musical and pictorial
+decorations, expressing nothing more definite than that sense of
+beauty which haunts the world. The fields give flowers, and the hands
+of man works of art.
+
+Then this art is wholly irresponsible--it grows, obeying no rules,
+even as the flowers?
+
+In obedience to the laws of some irregular metre so delicate and
+subtle that its structure escapes our analysis, the flowers bloom in
+faultless, flawless, and ever-varying variety. We can only say these
+are beautiful because they are beautiful....
+
+That is begging the question.
+
+He who attempts to go to the root of things always finds himself
+begging the question in the end....
+
+But you have to admit that a drawing that does not correspond to the
+object which the artist has set himself to copy cannot be well drawn.
+
+That idea is the blight that has fallen on European art. The goodness
+or the badness of a drawing exists independently of the thing copied.
+We say--speaking of a branch, of a cloud, of a rock, of a flower, of a
+leaf--how beautifully drawn! Some clouds and some leaves are better
+drawn than others, not on account of complexity or simplicity of form,
+but because they interpret an innate sense of harmony inherent in us.
+And this natural drawing, which exists sometimes irrespective of
+anatomies and proportions, is always Utamaro's.
+
+I do not know how long I stood examining this beautiful drawing,
+studying the grey and the green tint, admiring the yellow flowers on
+the dresses, wondering at the genius that placed the yellow umbrella
+in the idol's hand, the black masses of hair above the faces, so
+charmingly decorated with great yellow hair-pins. I watched the beauty
+of the trees, and was moved by the placing of the trees in the
+composition, and I delighted in the delicate blossoms. I was enchanted
+by all this bright and gracious paganism which Western civilisation
+has already defaced, and in a few years will have wholly destroyed.
+
+I might describe more prints, and the pleasure they have given me; I
+might pile epithet upon epithet; I might say that the colour was as
+deep and as delicate as flower-bloom, and every outline spontaneous,
+and exquisite to the point of reminding me of the hopbine and ferns.
+It would be well to say these things; the praise would be appropriate
+to the occasion; but rather am I minded to call the reader's attention
+to what seems to me to be an essential difference between the East and
+the West.
+
+Michael Angelo and Velasquez, however huge their strength in
+portraiture and decoration, however sublime Veronese and Tintoretto in
+magnificent display of colour, we must perforce admit to Oriental art
+a refinement of thought and a delicacy of handicraft--the outcome of
+the original thought--which never was attained by Italy, and which so
+transcends our grosser sense that it must for ever remain only half
+perceived and understood by us.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW ART CRITICISM.
+
+
+Before commenting on the very thoughtless utterances of two
+distinguished men, I think I must--even at the risk of appearing to
+attach over-much importance to my criticisms--reprint what I said
+about _L'Absinthe_; for in truth it was I who first meddled with
+the moral tap, and am responsible for the overflow:--
+
+    "Look at the head of the old Bohemian--the engraver Deboutin--a man
+    whom I have known all my life, and yet he never really existed for
+    me until I saw this picture. There is the hat I have always known,
+    on the back of his head as I have always seen it, and the wooden
+    pipe is held tight in his teeth as I have always seen him hold it.
+    How large, how profound, how simple the drawing! How easily and
+    how naturally he lives in the pose, the body bent forward, the
+    elbows on the table! Fine as the Orchardson undoubtedly is, it seems
+    fatigued and explanatory by the side of this wonderful rendering of
+    life; thin and restless--like Dumas fils' dialogue when we compare
+    it with Ibsen's. The woman that sits beside the artist was at the
+    Elysée Montmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the
+    _ratmort_ and had a soupe _aux choux_; she lives in the
+    Rue Fontaine, or perhaps the Rue Breda; she did not get up till
+    half-past eleven; then she tied a few soiled petticoats round her,
+    slipped on that peignoir, thrust her feet into those loose morning
+    shoes, and came down to the café to have an absinthe before breakfast.
+    Heavens! what a slut! A life of idleness and low vice is upon her
+    face; we read there her whole life. _The tale is not a pleasant one,
+    but it is a lesson_. Hogarth's view was larger, wider, but not so
+    incisive, so deep, or so intense. Then how loose and general Hogarth's
+    composition would seem compared to this marvellous epitome, this
+    essence of things! That open space in front of the table, into which
+    the skirt and the lean legs of the man come so well--how well the
+    point of view was selected! The beautiful, dissonant rhythm of that
+    composition is like a page of Wagner--the figures crushed into the
+    right of the canvas, the left filled up with a fragment of marble
+    table running in sharp perspective into the foreground. The newspaper
+    lies as it would lie across the space between the tables. The colour,
+    almost a monochrome, is very beautiful, a deep, rich harmony. More
+    marvellous work the world never saw, and will never see again: a maze
+    of assimilated influences, strangely assimilated, and eluding
+    definition--remembrances of Watteau and the Dutch painters, a good
+    deal of Ingres' spirit, and, in the vigour of the arabesque, we may
+    perhaps trace the influence of Poussin. But these influences float
+    evanescent on the canvas, and the reading is difficult and
+    contradictory."
+
+I have written many a negligent phrase, many a stupid phrase, but the
+italicised phrase is the first hypocritical phrase I ever wrote. I
+plead guilty to the grave offence of having suggested that a work of
+art is more than a work of art. The picture is only a work of art, and
+therefore void of all ethical signification. In writing the abominable
+phrase "_but it is a lesson_" I admitted as a truth the ridiculous
+contention that a work of art may influence a man's moral conduct; I
+admitted as a truth the grotesque contention that to read _Mdlle. de
+Maupin_ may cause a man to desert his wife, whereas to read _Paradise
+Lost_ may induce him to return to her. In the abominable phrase which
+I plead guilty to having written, I admitted the monstrous contention
+that our virtues and our vices originate not in our inherited natures,
+but are found in the books we read and the pictures we look upon. That
+art should be pure is quite another matter, and the necessity of
+purity in art can be maintained for other than ethical reasons. Art--I
+am speaking now of literature--owes a great deal to ethics, but
+ethics owes nothing to art. Without morality the art of the novelist
+and the dramatist would cease. So we are more deeply interested in the
+preservation of public morality than any other class--the clergy, of
+course, excepted. To accuse us of indifference in this matter is
+absurd. We must do our best to keep up a high standard of public
+morality; our living depends upon it--and it would be difficult to
+suggest a more powerful reason for our advocacy. Nevertheless, by a
+curious irony of fate we must preserve--at least, in our books--a
+distinctly impartial attitude on the very subject which most nearly
+concerns our pockets.
+
+To remove these serious disabilities should be our serious aim. It
+might be possible to enter into some arrangement with the bishops to
+allow us access to the pulpits. Mr. So-and so's episcopal style--I
+refer not only to this gentleman's writings, but also to his style of
+figure, which, on account of the opportunities it offers for a display
+of calf, could not fail to win their lordships' admiration--marks him
+as the proper head and spokesman of the deputation; and his well-known
+sympathies for the pecuniary interests of authors would enable him to
+explain that not even their lordships' pockets were so gravely
+concerned in the maintenance of public morality as our own.
+
+I have allowed my pen to wander somewhat from the subject in hand; for
+before permitting myself to apologise for having hypocritically
+declared a great picture to be what it was not, and could not be--"a
+lesson"--it was clearly incumbent on me to show that the moral
+question was the backbone of the art which I practise myself, and that
+of all classes none are so necessarily moral as novelists. I think I
+have done this beyond possibility of disproof, or even of argument,
+and may therefore be allowed to lament my hypocrisy with as many tears
+and groans as I deem sufficient for the due expiation of my sin.
+Confession eases the heart. Listen. My description of Degas' picture
+seemed to me a little unconventional, and to soothe the reader who is
+shocked by everything that lies outside his habitual thought, and to
+dodge the reader who is always on the watch to introduce a discussion
+on that sterile subject, "morality in art", to make things pleasant
+for everybody, to tickle the Philistine in his tenderest spot, I told
+a little lie: I suggested that some one had preached. I ought to have
+known human nature better--what one dog does another dog will do, and
+straight away preaching began--Zola and the drink question from Mr.
+Richmond, sociology from Mr. Crane.
+
+But the picture is merely a work of art, and has nothing to do with
+drink or sociology; and its title is not _L' Absinthe_, nor even _Un
+Homme et une Femme assis dans un Café_, as Mr. Walter Sickert
+suggests, but simply _Au Café_. Mr. Walter Crane writes: "Here is a
+study of human degradation, male and female." Perhaps Mr. Walter Crane
+will feel inclined to apologise for his language when he learns that
+the man who sits tranquilly smoking his pipe is a portrait of the
+engraver Deboutin, a man of great talent and at least Mr. Walter
+Crane's equal as a writer and as a designer. True that M. Deboutin
+does not dress as well as Mr. Walter Crane, but there are many young
+men in Pall Mall who would consider Mr. Crane's velvet coat, red
+necktie, and soft felt hat quite intolerable, yet they would hardly be
+justified in speaking of a portrait of Mr. Walter Crane as a study of
+human degradation. Let me assure Mr. Walter Crane that when he speaks
+of M. Deboutin's life as being degraded, he is speaking on a subject
+of which he knows nothing. M. Deboutin has lived a very noble life, in
+no way inferior to Mr. Crane's; his life has been entirely devoted to
+art and literature; his etchings have been for many years the
+admiration of artistic Paris, and he has had a play in verse performed
+at the Théâtre Français.
+
+The picture represents M. Deboutin in the café of the _Nouvelle
+Athènes_ He has come down from his studio for breakfast, and he will
+return to his dry-points when he has finished his pipe. I have known
+M. Deboutin a great number of years, and a more sober man does not
+exist; and Mr. Crane's accusations of drunkenness might as well be
+made against Mr. Bernard Shaw. When, hypocritically, I said the
+picture was a lesson, I referred to the woman, who happens to be
+sitting next to M. Deboutin. Mr. Crane, Mr. Richmond, and others have
+jumped to the conclusion that M. Deboutin has come to the café with
+the woman, and that they are "boozing" together. Nothing can be
+farther from the truth. Deboutin always came to the café alone, as did
+Manet, Degas, Duranty. Deboutin is thinking of his dry-points; the
+woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she would
+probably answer, _"je suis à la coule"_. But there is no implication
+of drunkenness in the phrase. In England this class of woman is
+constantly drunk, in France hardly ever; and the woman Degas has
+painted is typical of her class, and she wears the habitual expression
+of her class. And the interest of the subject, from Degas' point of
+view, lies in this strange contrast--the man thinking of his
+dry-points, the woman thinking, as the phrase goes, of nothing at all.
+_Au Café_--that is the title of the picture. How simple, how
+significant! And how the picture gains in meaning when the web of
+false melodrama that a couple of industrious spiders have woven about
+it is brushed aside!
+
+I now turn to the more interesting, and what I think will prove the
+more instructive, part of my task--the analysis of the art criticism
+of Mr. Richmond and Mr. Crane.
+
+Mr. Richmond says "it is not painting at all". We must understand
+therefore that the picture is void of all accomplishment--composition,
+drawing, and handling. We will take Mr. Richmond's objections in their
+order. The subject-matter out of which the artist extracted his
+composition was a man and woman seated in a café furnished with marble
+tables. The first difficulty the artist had to overcome was the
+symmetry of the lines of the tables. Not only are they exceedingly
+ugly from all ordinary points of view, but they cut the figures in
+two. The simplest way out of the difficulty would be to place one
+figure on one side of a table, the other on the other side, and this
+composition might be balanced by a waiter seen in the distance. That
+would be an ordinary arrangement of the subject. But the ingenuity
+with which Degas selects his point of view is without parallel in the
+whole history of art. And this picture is an excellent example. One
+line of tables runs up the picture from left to right, another line of
+tables, indicated by three parts of one table, strikes right across
+the foreground. The triangle thus formed is filled by the woman's
+dress, which is darker than the floor and lighter than the leather
+bench on which both figures are seated. Looking still more closely
+into the composition, we find that it is made of several perspectives
+--the dark perspective of the bench, the light perspective of the
+partition behind, on which the light falls, and the rapid perspective
+of the marble table in the foreground. The man is high up on the
+right-hand corner, the woman is in the middle of the picture, and
+Degas has been careful to place her in front of the opening between
+the tables, for by so doing he was able to carry his half-tint right
+through the picture. The empty space on the left, so characteristic of
+Degas's compositions, admirably balances the composition, and it is
+only relieved by the stone matchbox, and the newspaper thrown across
+the opening between the tables. Everywhere a perspective, and these
+are combined with such strange art that the result is synthetic. A
+beautiful dissonant rhythm, always symphonic _coulant longours de
+source_; an exasperated vehemence and a continual desire of novelty
+penetrated and informed by a severely classical spirit--that is my
+reading of this composition.
+
+"The qualities admired by this new school are certainly the mirrors of
+that side of the nineteenth-century development most opposed to fine
+painting, or, say, fine craftsmanship. Hurry, rush, fashion, are the
+enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works
+are produced. Hence the admiration for an art fully answering to a
+demand. No doubt impressionism is an expression in painting of the
+deplorable side of modern life."
+
+After "forty years of the study of the best art of various schools
+that the galleries of Europe display", Mr. Richmond mistakes Degas for
+an impressionist (I use the word in its accepted sense); he follows
+the lead of the ordinary art critic who includes Degas among the
+impressionists because Degas paints dancing lessons, and because he
+has once or twice exhibited with Monet and his followers. The best
+way--possibly the only way--to obtain any notion of the depth of the
+abyss on which we stand will be by a plain statement of the facts.
+
+When Ingres fell down in the fit from which he never recovered, it was
+Degas who carried him out of his studio. Degas had then been working
+with Ingres only a few months, but that brief while convinced Ingres
+of his pupil's genius, and it is known that he believed that it would
+be Degas who would carry on the classical tradition of which he was a
+great exponent. Degas has done this, not as Flandren tried to, by
+reproducing the externality of the master's work, but as only a man of
+genius could, by the application of the method to new material.
+Degas's early pictures, "The Spartan Youths" and "Semiramis building
+the Walls of Babylon". are pure Ingres. To this day Degas might be
+very fairly described as _un petit Ingres_. Do we not find Ingres'
+penetrating and intense line in the thin straining limbs of Degas's
+ballet-girls, in the heavy shoulders of his laundresses bent over the
+ironing table, and in the coarse forms of his housewives who sponge
+themselves in tin baths? The vulgar, who see nothing of a work of art
+but its external side, will find it difficult to understand that the
+art of "La Source" and of Degas's cumbersome housewives is the same.
+To the vulgar, Bouguereau and not Degas is the interpreter of the
+classical tradition.
+
+'Hurry, rush, fashion, are the enemies of toil, patience, and
+seclusion, without which no great works are produced.'
+
+For the sake of his beloved drawing Degas has for many years locked
+himself into his studio from early morning till late at night,
+refusing to open even to his most intimate friends. Coming across him
+one morning in a small café, where he went at midday to eat a cutlet,
+I said, "My dear friend, I haven't seen you for years; when may I
+come?" The answer I received was: "You're an old friend, and if you'll
+make an appointment I'll see you. But I may as well tell you that for
+the last two years no one has been in my studio." On the whole it is
+perhaps as well that I declined to make an appointment, for another
+old friend who went, and who stayed a little longer than he was
+expected to stay, was thrown down the staircase. And that staircase is
+spiral, as steep as any ladder. Until he succeeded in realising his
+art Degas's tongue was the terror of artistic Paris; his solitary
+days, the strain on the nerves that the invention and composition of
+his art, so entirely new and original, entailed, wrecked his temper,
+and there were moments when his friends began to dread the end that
+his striving might bring about. But with the realisation of his
+artistic ideal his real nature returned, and he is now full of kind
+words for the feeble, and full of indulgence for the slightest
+artistic effort.
+
+The story of these terrible years of striving is written plainly
+enough on every canvas signed by Degas; yet Mr. Richmond imagines him
+skipping about airily from café to café, dashing off little
+impressions. In another letter Mr. Richmond says, 'Perfect
+craftsmanship, such as was Van Eyck's, Holbein's, Bellini's, Michael
+Angelo's, becomes more valuable as time goes on.' It is interesting to
+hear that Mr. Richmond admires Holbein's craftsmanship, but it will be
+still more interesting if he will explain how and why the head of the
+old Bohemian in the picture entitled "L'Absinthe" is inferior to
+Holbein. The art of Holbein, as I understand it--and if I do not
+understand it rightly I shall be delighted to have my mistake
+explained to me--consists of measurements and the power of observing
+and following an outline with remorseless precision. Now Degas in his
+early manner was frequently this. His portrait of his father listening
+to Pagan singing whilst he accompanied himself on the guitar is pure
+Holbein. Whether it is worse or better than Holbein is a matter of
+individual opinion; but to affect to admire Holbein and to decline to
+admire the portrait I speak of is--well, incomprehensible. The
+portrait of Deboutin in the picture entitled "L'Absinthe" is a later
+work, and is not quite so nearly in the manner of Holbein; but it is
+quite nearly enough to allow me to ask Mr. Richmond to explain how,
+and why it is inferior to Holbein. Inferior is not the word I want,
+for Mr. Richmond holds Holbein to be one of the greatest painters the
+world ever knew, and Degas to be hardly a painter at all.
+
+For three weeks the pens of art critics, painters, designers, and
+engravers have been writing about this picture--about this rough
+Bohemian who leans over the café table with his wooden pipe fixed fast
+between his teeth, with his large soft felt hat on the back of his
+head, upheld there by a shock of bushy hair, with his large battered
+face grown around with scanty, unkempt beard, illuminated by a fixed
+and concentrated eye which tells us that his thoughts are in pursuit
+of an idea--about one of the finest specimens of the art of this
+century--and what have they told us? Mr. Richmond mistakes the work
+for some hurried sketch--impressionism--and practically declares the
+painting to be worthless. Mr. Walter Crane says it is only fit for a
+sociological museum or for an illustrated tract in a temperance
+propaganda; he adds some remarks about "a new Adam and Eve and a
+paradise of unnatural selection" which escape my understanding. An
+engraver said that the picture was a vulgar subject vulgarly painted.
+Another set of men said the picture was wonderful, extraordinary,
+perfect, complete, excellent. But on neither side was any attempt made
+to explain why the picture was bad or why the picture was excellent.
+The picture is excellent, but why is it excellent? Because the scene
+is like a real scene passing before your eyes? Because nothing has
+been omitted that might have been included, because nothing has been
+included that might have been omitted? Because the painting is clear,
+smooth, and limpid and pleasant to the eye? Because the colour is
+harmonious, and though low in tone, rich and strong? Because each face
+is drawn in its distinctive lines, and each tells the tale of
+instincts and of race? Because the clothing is in its accustomed folds
+and is full of the individuality of the wearer? We look on this
+picture and we ask ourselves how it is that amongst the tens and
+hundreds of thousands of men who have painted men and women in their
+daily occupations, habits, and surroundings, no one has said so much
+in so small a space, no one has expressed himself with that simplicity
+which draws all veils aside, and allows us to look into the heart of
+nature.
+
+Where is the drawing visible except in the result? How beautifully
+concise it is, and yet it is large, supple, and true without excess of
+reality. Can you detect anywhere a measurement? Do you perceive a
+base, a fixed point from which the artist calculated and compared his
+drawing? That hat, full of the ill-usage of the studio, hanging on the
+shock of bushy hair, the perspective of those shoulders, and the round
+of the back, determining the exact width and thickness of the body,
+the movement of the arm leaning on the table, and the arm perfectly in
+the sleeve, and the ear and the shape of the neck hidden in the shadow
+of the hat and hair, and the battered face, sparely sown with an
+ill-kempt beard, illuminated by a fixed look which tells us that his
+thoughts are in pursuit of an idea--this old Bohemian smoking his
+pipe, does he not seem to have grown out of the canvas as naturally
+and mysteriously as a herb or plant? By the side of this drawing do
+not all the drawings in the gallery of English, French, Belgian, and
+Scandinavian seem either childish, ignorant-timed, or presumptuous? By
+the side of this picture do not all the other pictures in the gallery
+seem like little painted images?
+
+Compared with this drawing, would not Holbein seem a little
+geometrical? Again I ask if you can detect in any outline or accent a
+fixed point from whence the drawing was measured, calculated, and
+constructed. In the drawing of all the other painters you trace the
+method and you take note of the knowledge through which the model has
+been seen and which has, as it were, dictated to the eye what it
+should see. But in Degas the science of the drawing is hidden from
+us--a beautiful flexible drawing almost impersonal, bending to and
+following the character, as naturally as the banks follow the course
+of their river.
+
+I stop, although I have not said everything. To complete my study of
+this picture we should have to examine that smooth, clean, supple
+painting of such delicate and yet such a compact tissue; we should
+have to study that simple expressive modelling; we should have to
+consider the resources of that palette, reduced almost to a monochrome
+and yet so full of colour. I stop, for I think I have said enough to
+rouse if not to fully awaken suspicion in Mr. Richmond and Mr. Crane
+of the profound science concealed in a picture about which I am afraid
+they have written somewhat thoughtlessly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the midst of a somewhat foolish and ignorant argument regarding the
+morality and the craftsmanship of a masterpiece, the right of the new
+art criticism to adversely criticise the work of Royal Academicians
+has been called into question. I cull the following from the columns
+of the _Westminster Gazette_;--
+
+'Their words are practically the same; their praise and blame are
+similarly inspired; the means they employ to gain their object
+identical. So much we can see for ourselves. As for their object and
+their _bona-fides_, they concern me not. It is what they do, not what
+they are, that is the question here. What they do is to form a caucus
+in art criticism, and owing to their vehemence and the limitation of
+their aim, a caucus which is increasing in influence, and, to the best
+of my belief, doing cruel injustice to many great artists, and much
+injury to English art. It is for this reason, and this reason only,
+that I have taken up my parable on the subject. I have in vain
+endeavoured to induce those whose words would come with far greater
+authority than mine to do so. I went personally to the presidents of
+the two greatest artistic bodies in the kingdom to ask them to speak
+or write on the subject, but I found their view to be that such action
+would be misconstrued, and would in their position be unbecoming.'
+
+The meaning of all this is that the ferret is in the hole and the rats
+have begun to squeak already. Soon they will come hopping out of St.
+John's Wood Avenue, so make ready your sticks and stones.
+
+In April 1892 I wrote: 'The position of the Academy is as impregnable
+as Gibraltar. But Gibraltar itself was once captured by a small
+company of resolute men, and if ever there exist in London six
+resolute art critics, each capable of distinguishing between a bad
+picture and a good one, each determined at all costs to tell the
+truth, and if these six critics will keep in line, then, and not till
+then, some of the reforms so urgently needed, and so often demanded
+from the Academy, will be granted. I do not mean that these six
+critics will bring the Academicians on their knees by writing
+fulminating articles on the Academy. Such attacks were as idle as
+whistling for rain on the house-tops. The Academicians laugh at such
+attacks, relying on the profound indifference of the public to
+artistic questions. But there is another kind of attack which the
+Academicians may not ignore, and that is true criticism. If six
+newspapers were to tell the simple truth about the canvases which the
+Academicians will exhibit next month, the Academicians would soon cry
+out for quarter and grant all necessary reforms.'
+
+I have only now to withdraw the word "reform". The Academy cannot
+reform, and must be destroyed. The Academy has tried to reform, and
+has failed. Thirty years ago the pre-Raphaelite movement nearly
+succeeded in bringing about an effectual shipwreck. But when Mr.
+Holman Hunt went to Italy, special terms were offered and accepted.
+The election of Millais and Watts saved the Academy, and instead of
+the Academy, it was the genius of one of England's greatest painters
+that was destroyed. "Ophelia", "Autumn Leaves", and "St. Agnes' Eve"
+are pictures that will hold their own in any gallery among pictures of
+every age and every country. But fathomless is the abyss which
+separates them from Sir John Millais' academic work.
+
+The Academy is a distinctly commercial enterprise. Has not Sir John
+Millais said, in an interview, that the hanging committee at
+Burlington House selects the pictures that will draw the greatest
+number of shillings. The Academy has been subventioned by the State to
+the extent of three hundred thousand pounds, and that money has been
+employed in arrogant commercialism. The Academy holds a hundred
+thousand pounds in trust, left by Mr. Chantry for the furtherance of
+art in this country; and this money is spent on the purchase of
+pictures by impecunious Academicians, and the collection formed with
+this money is one of the seven horrors of civilisation. The Academy
+has tolerated genius when it was popular, it has trampled upon genius
+when it was unpopular; and the business of the new art criticism is to
+rid art of the incubus. The Academy must be destroyed, and when that
+is accomplished the other Royal institutes will follow as a matter of
+course. The object of the new art criticism is to give free trade to
+art.
+
+
+
+
+LONG AGO IN ITALY.
+
+
+Come to the New Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary
+London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping
+umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives
+of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an
+enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and gold,
+and purple raiment; of beautiful youths crowned with flowers; of
+fabulous blue landscape and delicate architecture. Know ye the land?
+Botticelli is king there, king of clasped hands and almond-eyed
+Madonnas. It was he who conceived and designed that enigmatic Virgin's
+face; it was he who placed that long-fingered hand on the thigh of the
+Infant God; it was he who coiled that heavy hair about that triangle
+of neck and interwove it with pearls; it was he who drew the graceful
+lace over the head-dress, and painted it in such innumerable delicacy
+of fold that we wonder and are fain to believe that it is but the
+magic of an instant's hallucination. Know ye the land? Filippo Lippi
+is prince there, prince of angel youths, fair hair crowned with fair
+flowers; they stand round a tall throne with strings of coral and
+precious stones in their hands. It was Filippo Lippi who composed that
+palette of grey soft pearly pink; it was he who placed that beautiful
+red in the right-hand corner, and carried it with such enchanting
+harmony through the yellow raiment of the angel youth, echoing it in a
+subdued key in the vesture which the Virgin wears under her blue
+garment, and by means of the red coral which decorates the tall throne
+he carried it round the picture; it was he, too, who filled those
+angel eyes with passion such as awakens in heaven at the touch of
+wings, at the sound of citherns and cintoles.
+
+Know ye the land where Botticelli and Filippo Lippi dreamed immortal
+dreams? Know ye the land, Italy in the fifteenth century? Exquisite
+angel faces were their visions by day and night, and their thoughts
+were mystic landscapes and fantastic architecture; aureoles, roses,
+pearls, and rich embroideries were parcel of their habitual sense; and
+the decoration of a surface with beautiful colour was their souls'
+desire. Of truth of effect and local colour they knew nothing, and
+cared nothing. Beauty for beauty's sake was the first article of their
+faith. They measured a profile with relentless accuracy, and followed
+its outline unflinchingly, their intention was no more than to produce
+a likeness of the lady who sat posing for her portrait, but some
+miracle saved them from base naturalism. The humblest, equally with
+the noblest dreamer, was preserved from it; and that their eyes
+naturally saw more beautifully than ours seems to be the only
+explanation. Ugliness must have always existed; but Florentine eyes
+did not see ugliness. Or did their eyes see it, and did they disdain
+it? Do they owe their art to a wise festheticism, or to a fortunate
+limitation of sight? These are questions that none may answer, but
+which rise up in our mind and perplex us when we enter the New
+Gallery; for verily it would seem, from the dream pictures there, that
+a time once existed upon earth when the world was fair as a garden,
+and life was a happy aspiration. In the fifteenth century the world
+seems to have been made of gold, jewellery, pictures, embroidered
+stuffs, statues, and engraved weapons; in the fifteenth century the
+world seems to have been inhabited only by nobles and prelates; and
+the only buildings that seem to have existed were palaces and
+cathedrals. Then Art seemed for all men, and life only for
+architecture, painting, carving, and engraving long rapiers; and
+length of time for monks to illuminate great missals in the happy
+solitude of their cells, and for nuns to weave embroideries and to
+stitch jewelled vestments.
+
+The Florentines loved their children as dearly as we do ours; but in
+their pictures there is but the Divine Child. They loved girls and
+gallantries as well as we do; but in their pictures there are but the
+Virgin and a few saints.
+
+History tells us that wars, massacres, and persecutions were frequent
+in the fifteenth century; but in its art we learn no more of the
+political than we do of the domestic life of the century. The Virgin
+and Child were sufficient inspiration for hundreds of painters. Now
+she is in full-face, now in three-quarter face, now in profile. In
+this picture she wears a blue cloak, in that picture she is clad in a
+grey. She is alone with the Child in a bower of tall roses, or she is
+seated on a high throne. Perhaps the painter has varied the
+composition by the introduction of St. John leaning forward with
+clasped hands; or maybe he has introduced a group of angels, as
+Filippo Lippi has done. The throne is sometimes high, sometimes low;
+but such slight alteration is enough for a new picture. And several
+generations of painters seem to have lived and died believing that
+their art was to all practical and artistic purposes limited to the
+continual variation of this theme.
+
+Among these painters Botticelli was the incontestable master; but
+about him crowd hundreds of pictures, pictures rather than names.
+Imagine a number of workmen anxious to know how they should learn to
+paint well, to paint with brilliancy, with consistency, with ease, and
+with lasting colours. Imagine a collection of gold ornaments, jewels,
+and enamels, in which we can detect the skill of the goldsmith, of the
+painter of stained-glass, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of
+missals; the inspiration is grave and monastic, the destination a
+palace or a cathedral, the effect dazzling; and out of this miraculous
+handicraft Filippo Lippi is always distinct, soft as the dawn,
+mysterious as a flower, less vigorous but more illusive than
+Botticelli, and so strangely personal that while looking at him we are
+absorbed.
+
+To differentiate between the crowd of workmen that surrounded Filippo
+Lippi and Botticelli were impossible. They painted beautiful things
+because they lived in an age in which ugliness hardly existed, or was
+not as visible as it is now; they were content to merge their
+personalities in an artistic formula; none sought to invent a
+personality which did not exist in himself. Employing without question
+a method of drawing and of painting that was common to all of them,
+they worked in perfect sympathy, almost in collaboration. Plagiarism
+was then a virtue; they took from each other freely; and the result is
+a collective rather than individual inspirations. Now and then genius
+breaks through, as a storm breaks a spell of summer weather. "The
+Virgin and Child, with St. Clare and St. Agatha", lent by Mrs. Austin
+and the trustees of the late J. T. Austin, is one of the most
+beautiful pictures I have ever seen. The temperament of the painter,
+his special manner of feeling and seeing, is strangely, almost
+audaciously, affirmed in the mysterious sensuality of the angels'
+faces; the painter lays bare a rare and remote corner of his soul;
+something has been said that was never said before, and never has been
+said so well since. But if the expression given to these angels is
+distinctive, it is extraordinarily enhanced by the beauty of the
+colour. Indeed, the harmony of the colour-scheme is inseparable from
+the melodious expressiveness of the eyes. Look at the gesture of the
+hand on the right; is not the association of ideas strangely intimate,
+curious, and profound?
+
+But come and let us look at a real Botticelli, a work which convinces
+at the first glance by the extraordinary expressiveness of the
+drawing, by the originality of the design, by the miraculous
+handicraft; let us look at the "Virgin and Child and St. John", lent
+by Messrs. Colnaghi.
+
+It is a panel some 36 by 25 inches, almost filled by a life-size
+three-quarter-length figure of the Virgin. She is seated on the right,
+and holds the Infant Saviour in her arms. In the foreground on the
+left there is a book and cushion, behind which St. John stands, his
+hands clasped, bearing a cross. Never was a head designed with more
+genius than that strange Virgin, ecstatic, mysterious, sphinx-like;
+with half-closed eyes, she bends her face to meet her God's kiss. In
+this picture Botticelli sought to realise the awfulness of the
+Christian mystery: the Mother leans to the kiss of her Son--her Son,
+who is likewise her God, and her brain is dim with its ecstasy. She is
+perturbed and overcome; the kiss is in her brain, and it trembles on
+her lips. You who have not seen the picture will think that this
+description is but the tale of the writer who reads his fancies into
+the panel before him. But the intention of the painter did not
+outstrip the power of expression which his fingers held. He expressed
+what I say he expressed, and more perfectly, more suggestively, than
+any words. And how? It will be imagined that it was by means of some
+illusive line that Botticelli rendered the very touch and breath of
+this extraordinary kiss; by that illusive line which Degas employs in
+his expressions of the fugitive and the evanescent. How great,
+therefore, is our surprise when we look into the picture to find that
+the mystery and ecstasy of this kiss are expressed by a hard, firm,
+dark line.
+
+And the sensation of this strange ecstatic kiss pervades the entire
+composition; it is embodied in the hand placed so reverently on the
+thigh of the Infant God and in the eyes of St. John, who watches the
+divine mystery which is being accomplished. On St. John's face there
+is earthly reverence and awe; on Christ's face, though it is drawn in
+rigid outline, though it looks as if it were stamped out of iron,
+there is universal love, cloudlike and ineffable; and Christ's knees
+are drawn close, and the hand of the Virgin holds them close; and
+through the hand come bits of draperies exquisitely designed. Indeed,
+the distribution of line through the picture is as perfect as the
+distribution of colour; the form of the blue cloak is as perfect as
+the colour, and the green cape falls from the shoulder, satisfying
+both senses; the crimson vesture which she wears underneath her cloak
+is extraordinarily pure, and balances the crimson cloak which St. John
+wears. But these beauties are subordinate to the beauty of the
+Virgin's head. How grand it is in style! How strange and enigmatic!
+And in the design of that head Botticelli has displayed all his skill.
+The fair hair is covered with delicate gauze edged with lace, and
+overcoming the difficulties of that most rebellious of all
+mediums--tempera!--his brush worked over the surface, fulfilling his
+slightest thought, realising all the transparency of gauze, the
+intricacy of lace, the brightness of crimson silk, the very gravity of
+the embossed binding of the book, the sway and texture of every
+drapery, the gold of the tall cross, and the darker gold of the
+aureole high up in the picture, set against a strip of Florentine sky.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MODERN PAINTING ***
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