LIBERDADE AO VENTO

Douche as grazas pola cortesía tida,

Polo amor constante demostrado.

Douche as grazas polo ventre hinchado o redondo.

Douche as grazas por compatir o ar quente

De noso coarto amable, cómplice do amor constante.

Douche as grazas polo bico atrevido e insolente.

Polo respecto incautado,

Polo dereito a liberdade constante.

Estimo o ar ceibo perdido no medio do ar voante.

Dou a man au meu paisano contanste, insolente e atrevido.

Pero o ritmo do furacán temeroso,

Habita os espazos baleiros e as verdades asulagadas

De tremendas verdades inmensas,

Grandes como cons enormes e pesados.

Incendio o amor sen lume o amor desherdado

Habito a paixón extrema que me ocupa.

Vivo tocando cada elemento sublime,

Alcanzado pola liberdade voando

Polos aires de tódolos aires habidos.

Son coma a ave que que se libera

Das súas penas planeando

Polos espazos abertos e luminosos.



                         Miguel   Dubois

FABRICANTE DE MENTIRAS. O ARMADANZAS.

Non medras con absurdas mentiras.

Non mintas enganado.

Érguete do mundo falso.

Afronta, valentemente, o mundo da verdade

E se a verdade dóe, afaite a fortaleza,

Construída có traballo cotiá.

Non sexas un absurdo tremendo e inútil ser humano.

Non sexas un mundo valeiro carente

Da mínima personalidade enteira.

Para ser personalmente, presóa,

E nun abafante paiaso feirante.

Se alomenos foras un paioso profesional

Para a vida ganares

Serías unha persóa normal.

Mais non sexas un absurdo armadanzas.

Asume a verdade túa.

E non fabricas mentiras alleas a ti.


Miguel Dubois

DÓEME TANTO. INXUSTICIA

Heídeme liberar moito.

Pésame tanto. Demasiado.

A dor acumulada inxustamente.

A ferida aberta.

Dóeme,moito. Aguanto a dor. Me doe tanto.

Un paxaro tremendo espetouse

Sen aviso previo no corazón interno.

Sanda a dor continúa.

A mentira inxusta

Danza extraños bailes fantasmas.

Botaréi para fóra

O que non cabe na miña dor.

Porque ferir sen necesidade?

Miguel    Dubois

LAND'S END

THE END OF THE LAND, IT COULD BE POSSIBLE LIKE FINISTERRE

EXETER

THE WORD FOR ME IS FANTASTIC

DARMOUTH

OF COURSE A VERY NICE PLACE. I WOUL LIKE TO SAY: NO COMENTS

TEMPO

Tempo que andas ao cabalo do tempo,


Tempo voador vixiante e activo,


Suma de tantos menutos inéditos,


Suma de tantas horas decisivas,


Tempo acumulado escrito con altos números,


Tempo que imos queimando o espazo temporal


Tempo que non tes piedade da quietude,


Sempre pasas rápido  e bules


E, por veces, eres lentitude constante,


Cando anguria persoal ou colectiva peta no íntimo 




Interior onde máis doen as feridas sandantes


Tempo que fas escurecer a cor das pedras milenarias,


Tempo que fas enrrugar a miña faciana madura,


Tempo que crea nacementos ledos, choro e vida,


Tempo que chamas a decadencia da vida enteira,


Tempo que pareces moito máis  cá un deus corrente,


Tempo que escrita todas  as historias das historias.


Tempo que fas días enteiros e noites perdidas,


Que poderoso eres tempo, e fuxes bulindo


Sen pedir permiso. Ascendas ledicias


E apagas penas tempo sen pedir permiso a ninguén.




              Miguel    Dubois

AVANTE

Avante compañeiro, avante sen medo e con constante decisión.

No me aflixe o medo incoherente, as tremendas falsedades.

Avanzo coma o vento ceibo nun serán outonal.

Avanzo valeiro de peso inútil,

Quero avanzar coa necesidade do feito real.

Quero decir, basta xa, do laio inútil do xemido insensato.

Imos ao fronte onde non disparan por non querer facelo,

Imos na defensa dos nosos dereitos fundamentais.

Vou na recuperación persoal do inxustamente quitado.

Non me treman as pernas ergueitas,

Non me treman as mans extendidas.

Quero ir na recuperación do quitado do retirado inxustamente.

Non son máis que o que son e demando o dereito xusto.

Non se xoga cao verdade e non se engana coa mentira.

Avanzamos e non quedamos  na segunda fila.

Imos de cara ao fronte con toda a valentía.


       Miguel   Dubois

POEMA A MIÑA AMIGA

Sentin que non sentía nada de nada,

Que non pertencia ao Mundo que pertencera,

Sentín o sen sentido dunha palabra rota,

Ou sentín a chamada dun laio tremendo e extrano,

De súpeto era coma se fora noite pecha,

E penduraba o meu corzaón, coma colgado do meu peito ferido.

Que dificil era comprender que podería producirse,

Aquela ausencia querida con cheiro a primaveira feresca,

Sentín coma se bateran no meu interior

Con verbas tristes de repetida ausencia.

Non era decían , pero de seguro será,

E entón eu ía perdendo o discurso da plabra íntegra,

E as veces a mirada chea de vida enteira,

E as veces choraba fervenzas de bágoas constantes.

Que duro nun intre se me afacía todo,

Que insoportable se ma facía o verbo sorportar,

Era entón cando estouraba no verbo chorar,

E non sabía se  a hora chegaba.

Non sabía os límites do sufrimente.

Sentía unha poderosa frustación real,

Ante a miña total impotencia,

De devolvela ao Mundo,

Si, Ela grata e maravillosa

Có sorriso nos beizos belos

Porque eu tamén te quero.




                  Miguel    Dubois

MODERN PAINTING --GEORGE MOORE---1

8mdpt10.txt

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern Painting, by George Moore

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Title: Modern Painting

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MODERN PAINTING ***

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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

Page 1

8mdpt10.txt

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern Painting, by George Moore

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the

copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing

this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project

Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the

header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the

eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is

important information about your specific rights and restrictions in

how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a

donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

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

Page 1

8mdpt10.txt

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

Page 2

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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