by George Moore
That some men are born with a special aptitude for handling colour as other men are born with a special sense of proportions is undeniable; but Mr. MacColl’s thought goes further than this barren platitude, and if he means, as I think he does, that the faculty of handling is more instinctive than that of drawing, I should like to point out to him that handling did not become a merely personal caprice until the present century. A collection of ancient pictures does not present such endless experimentation with the material as a collection of modern pictures. Rubens, Hals, Velasquez, and Gainsborough do not contradict each other so violently regarding their use of the material as do Watts, Leighton, Millais, and Orchardson.
In the nineteenth century no one has made such beautiful use of the material as Manet and Whistler, and we find these two painters using it respectively exactly like Hals and Velasquez. It would therefore seem that those who excel in the use of paint are agreed as to the handling of it, just as all good dancers are agreed as to the step. But, though all good dancers dance the same step, each brings into his practice of it an individuality of movement and sense of rhythm sufficient to prevent it from becoming mechanical. The ancient painters relied on differences of feeling and seeing for originality rather than on eccentric handling of colour; and all these extraordinary executions which we meet in every exhibition of modern pictures are in truth no more than frantic efforts either to escape from the thraldom of a bad primary education, or attempts to disguise ignorance in fantastic formulas. That which cannot be referred back to the classics is not right, and I at least know not where to look among the acknowledged masters for justification for Mr. Steer’s jagged brushwork.
Mr. Walter Sickert, whose temperament is more irresponsible, is nevertheless content within the traditions of oil-painting. He exhibits two portraits, both very clever and neither satisfactory, for neither are carried beyond the salient lines of character. Nature has gifted Mr. Sickert with a keen hatred of the commonplace; his vision of life is at once complex and fragmentary, his command on drawing slow and uncertain, his rendering therefore as spasmodic as a poem by Browning. He picks up the connecting links with difficulty, and even his most complete work is full of omissions. The defect — for it is a defect — is by no means so fatal in the art-value of a painting as the futile explanations so dearly beloved by the ignorant. Manet was to the end the victim of man’s natural dislike of ellipses, and Mr. Walter Sickert is suffering the same fate. Still, even the most remote intelligence should be able to gather something of the merit of the portrait of Miss Minnie Cunningham. How well she is in that long red frock — a vermilion silhouette on a rich brown background! I should be still more pleased if the vermilion had been slightly broken with yellow ochre; but then, at heart, I am no more than un vieux classique. The edges of the vermilion hat are lightened where it receives the glare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer from the red. It is as light, as pretty, as suggestive as may be. The thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a manner I have not seen elsewhere, the enigma of the artificial life of the stage.
The aestheticism of the Glasgow school, of which we have heard so much lately, is identical with that of the New English Art Club, and the two societies are in a measure affiliated. Nearly all the members of the Glasgow school are members of the New English Art Club, and it is regrettable that they do not unite and give us an exhibition that would fairly stare the Academy out of countenance. Among the Glasgow painters the most prominent and valid talent is Mr. Guthrie’s. His achievements are more considerable and more personal; and he seems to approach very near to a full expression of the pictorial aspirations of his generation. Years ago his name was made known to me by a portrait of singular beauty; an oasis it was in a barren and bitter desert of Salon pictures. Since then he has adopted a different and better method of painting; and an excellent example of his present style is his portrait of Miss Spencer, a lady in a mauve gown. The slightness of the intention may be urged against the picture; it is no more than a charming decoration faintly flushed with life. But in his management of the mauve Mr. Guthrie achieved quite a little triumph: and the foreground, which is a very thin grey passed over a dark ground, is delicious, and the placing of the signature is in the right place. Most artists sign their pictures in the same place. But the signature should take a different place in every picture, for in every picture there is one and only one right place for the signature; and the true artist never fails to find the place which his work has chosen and consecrated for his name.
I confess myself to be a natural and instinctive admirer of Mr. Guthrie’s talent. His picture, “Midsummer”, exhibited at Liverpool, charmed me. Turning to my notes I find this description of it: “A garden in the summer’s very moment of complete efflorescence; a bower of limpid green, here and there interwoven with red flowers. And three ladies are there with their tiny Japanese tea-table. One dress — that on the left — is white, like a lily, drenched with green shadows; the dress on the right is a purple, beautiful as the depth of foxglove bells, A delicate and yet a full sensation of the beauty of modern life, from which all grossness has been omitted — a picture for which I think Corot would have had a good word to say.” In the same exhibition there was a pastel by Mr. Guthrie, which quite enchanted me with its natural, almost naïve, grace. Turning to my notes I extract the following lines: “A lady seated on a light chair, her body in profile, her face turned towards the spectator; she wears a dress with red stripes. One hand hanging by her side, the other hand holding open a flame-coloured fan; and it is this that makes the picture. The feet laid one over the other. The face, a mere indication; and for the hair, charcoal, rubbed and then heightened by two or three touches of the rich black of pastel-chalk. A delicate, a precious thing, rich in memories of Watteau and Whistler, of boudoir inspiration, and whose destination is clearly the sitting-room of a dilettante bachelor.”
Mr. Henry, another prominent member of the Glasgow school, exhibited a portrait of a lady in a straw hat — a rich and beautiful piece of painting, somewhat “made up” and over-modelled, still a piece of painting that one would like to possess. Mr. Hornell’s celebrated “Midsummer”, the detestation of aldermen, was there too. Imagine the picture cards, the ten of diamonds, and the eight of hearts shuffled rapidly upon a table covered with a Persian tablecloth. To ignore what are known as values seems to be the first principle of the Glasgow school. Hence a crude and discordant coloration without depth or richness. Hence an absence of light and the mystery of aërial perspective. But I have spoken very fully on this subject elsewhere.
Fifteen years ago it was customary to speak slightingly of the Old Masters, and it was thought that their mistakes could be easily rectified. Their dark skies and black foregrounds hold their own against all Monet’s cleverness, and it has begun to be suspected that even if nature be industriously and accurately copied in the fields, the result is not always a picture. The palette gives the value of the grass and of the trees, but, alas, not of the sky-the sky is higher in tone than the palette can go; the painter therefore gets a false value. Hence the tendency among the plein airists to leave out the sky or to do with as little sky as possible. A little reef is sufficient to bring about a great shipwreck; a generation has wasted half its life, and the Old Masters are again becoming the fashion. Mr. Furse seems to be deeply impressed with the truth of the new aestheticism. And he has succeeded within the limits of a tiny panel, a slight but charming intention. “The Great Cloud” rolls over a strip of lowland, lowering in a vast imperial whiteness, vague and shadowy as sleep or death. Ruysdael would have stopped for a moment to watch it. But its lyrical lilt would trouble a mind that could only think in prose; Shelley would like it better, and most certainly it would not fail to recall to his mind his own immortal verses —
“I am the daughter of earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky;
I pass through the pores of ocea
n and shores,
I change, but I cannot die.”
What will become of our young artists and their aspirations is a tale that time will unfold gradually, and for the larger part of its surprises we shall have to wait ten years. In ten years many of these aesthetes will have become common Academicians, working for the villas and perambulators of numerous families. Many will have disappeared for ever, some may be resurrected two generations hence, may be raised from the dead like Mr. Brabazon, our modern Lazarus —
“Lazare allait mourir une seconds fois,” —
or perchance to sleep for ever in Sir Joshua’s bosom. That a place will be found there for Mr. Brabazon is one of the articles of faith of the younger generation. Mr. Brabazon is described as an amateur, and the epithet is marvellously appropriate; no one — not even the great masters — deserved it better. The love of a long life is in those water-colours — they are all love; out of love they have grown, in its light they have flourished, and they have been made lovely with love.
In a time of slushy David Coxes, Mr. Brabazon’s eyes were strangely his own. Even then he saw Nature hardly explained at all — films of flowing colour transparent as rose-leaves, the lake’s blue, and the white clouds curling above the line of hills — a sense of colour and a sense of distance, that was all, and he had the genius to remain within the limitations of his nature. And, with the persistency of true genius, Mr. Brabazon painted, with a flowing brush, rose-leaf water-colours, unmindful of the long indifference of two generations, until it happened that the present generation, with its love of slight things, came upon this undiscovered genius. It has hailed him as master, and has dragged him into the popularity of a special exhibition of his work at the Goupil Galleries. And it was inevitable that the present young men should discover Mr. Brabazon: for in discovering him, they were discovering themselves — his art is no more than a curious anticipation of the artistic ideal of to-day.
The sketch he exhibits at the New English Art Club is a singularly beautiful tint of rose, spread with delicate grace over the paper. A little less, and there would be nothing; but a little beauty has always seemed to me preferable to a great deal of ugliness. And what is true about one is true about nearly all his drawings. We find in them always an harmonious colour contrast, and very rarely anything more. Sometimes there are those evanescent gradations of colour which are the lordship and signature of the colourist, and when le ton local is carried through the picture, through the deepest shadows as through the highest lights, when we find it persisting everywhere, as we do in No. 19, “Lake Maggiore”, we feel in our souls the joy that comes of perfect beauty. But too frequently Mr. Brabazon’s colour is restricted to an effective contrast; he often skips a great many notes, touching the extremes of the octave with certainty and with grace.
But it is right that we should make a little fuss over Mr. Brabazon; for though this work is slight, it is an accomplishment — he has indubitably achieved a something, however little that something may be; and when art is disappearing in the destroying waters of civilisation, we may catch at straws. Beyond colour — and even in colour his limitations are marked — Mr. Brabazon cannot go. He entered St. Mark’s, and of the delicacy of ornamentation, of the balance of the architecture, he saw nothing; neither the tracery of carven column nor the aërial perspective of the groined arches. It was his genius not to see these things — to leave out the drawing is better than to fumble with it, and all his life he has done this; and though we may say that a water-colour with the drawing left out is a very slight thing, we cannot fail to perceive that these sketches, though less than sonnets or ballades, or even rondeaus or rondels — at most they are triolets — are akin to the masters, however distant the relationship.
I have not told you about the very serious progress that Mr. George Thompson has made since the last exhibition; I have not described his two admirable pictures; nor mentioned Mr. Linder’s landscape, nor Mr. Buxton Knight’s “Haymaking Meadows”, nor Mr. Christie’s pretty picture “A May’s Frolic,” nor Mr. MacColl’s “Donkey Race”. I have omitted much that it would have been a pleasure to praise; for my intention was not to write a guide to the exhibition, but to interpret some of the characteristics of the young generation.
The New English Art Club is very typical of this end of the century. It is young, it is interesting, it is intelligent, it is emotional, it is cosmopolitan — not the Bouillon Duval cosmopolitanism of the Newlyn School, but rather an agreeable assimilation of the Montmartre café of fifteen years ago. Art has fallen in France, and the New English seems to me like a seed blown over-sea from a ruined garden. It has caught English root, and already English colour and fragrance are in the flower. A frail flower; but, frail or strong, it is all we have of art in the present generation. It is slight, and so most typical; for, surely, no age was ever so slight in its art as ours? As the century runs on it becomes more and more slight and more and more intelligent. A sheet of Whatman’s faintly flushed with a rose-tint, a few stray verses characterised with a few imperfect rhymes and a wrong accent, are sufficient foundation for two considerable reputations. The education of the younger generation is marvellous; its brains are excellent; it seems to be lacking in nothing except guts. As education spreads guts disappear, and that is the most serious word I have to say.
Without thinking of those great times when men lived in the giddiness and the exultation of a constant creation — when a day was sufficient for Rubens to paint the “Kermesse” thirteen days to paint the “Mages”, even or eight to paint the “Communion de St. François d’Assise” — and blotting from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and Veronese, let us merely remember that thirty years ago Millais painted a beautiful picture every year until marriage and its consequences brought his art to a sudden close. One year it was “Autumn Leaves”, the following year it was “St. Agnes’ Eve”, and behind these pictures there were at least ten masterpieces— “The Orchard”, “The Rainbow”, “Mariana in the Moated Grange”, “Ophelia”, etc. Millais is far behind Veronese and Tintoretto in magnificent excellence and extraordinary rapidity of production; but is not the New English Art Club even as far behind the excellence and fertility of production of thirty years ago?
A GREAT ARTIST.
WE HAVE HEARD the words “great artist” used so often and so carelessly that their tremendous significance escapes. The present is a time when it is necessary to consider the meaning, latent and manifest, of the words, for we are about to look on the drawings of the late Charles Keene.
In many the words evoke the idea of huge canvases in which historical incidents are depicted, conquerors on black horses covered with gold trappings, or else figures of Christ, or else the agonies of martyrs. The portrayal of angels is considered by the populace to be especially imaginative, and all who affect such subjects are at least in their day termed great artists. But the words are capable of a less vulgar interpretation. To the select few the great artist is he who is most racy of his native soil, he who has most persistently cultivated his talent in one direction, and in one direction only, he who has repeated himself most often, he who has lived upon himself the most avidly. In art, eclecticism means loss of character, and character is everything in art. I do not mean by character personal idiosyncrasies; I mean racial and territorial characteristics. Of personal idiosyncrasy we have enough and to spare. Indeed, it has come to be accepted almost as an axiom that it does not matter much how badly you paint, provided you do not paint badly like anybody else. But instead of noisy idiosyncrasy we want the calm of national character in our art. A national character can only be acquired by remaining at home and saturating ourselves in the spirit of our land until it oozes from our pens and pencils in every slightest word, in every slightest touch. Our lives should be one long sacrifice for this one thing — national character. Foreign travel should be eschewed, we should turn our eyes from Paris and Rome and fix them on our own fields; we should strive to remain ignorant, making our lives mole-li
ke, burrowing only in our own parish soil. There are no universities in art, but there are village schools; each of us should choose his master, imitate him humbly, striving to continue the tradition. And while labouring thus humbly, rather as handicraftsmen than as artists, our personality will gradually begin to appear in our work, not the weak febrile idiosyncrasy which lights a few hours of the artist’s youth, but a steady flame nourished by the rich oil of excellent lessons. If the work is good, very little personality is required. Are the individual temperaments of Terburg, Metzu, and Peter de Hoogh very strikingly exhibited in their pictures?
The paragraph I have just written will seem like a digression to the careless reader, but he who has read carefully, or will take the trouble to glance back, will not fail to see, that although in appearance digressive, it is a strict and accurate comment on Charles Keene, and the circumstances in which his art was produced. Charles Keene never sought after originality; on the contrary, he began by humbly imitating John Leech, the inventor of the method. His earliest drawings (few if any of them are exhibited in the present collection) were hardly distinguishable from Leech’s. He continued the tradition humbly, and originality stole upon him unawares. Charles Keene was not an erudite, he thought of very little except his own talent and the various aspects of English life which he had the power of depicting; but he knew thoroughly well the capacities of his talent, the direction in which it could be developed, and his whole life was devoted to its cultivation. He affected neither a knowledge of literature nor of Continental art; he lived in England and for England, content to tell the story of his own country and the age he lived in; in a word, he worked and lived as did the Dutchmen of 1630. He lived pure of all foreign influence; no man’s art was ever so purely English as Keene’s; even the great Dutchmen themselves were not more Dutch than Keene was English, and the result is often hardly less surprising. To look at some of these drawings and not think of the Dutchmen is impossible, for when we are most English we are most Dutch — our art came from Holland. These drawings are Dutch in the strange simplicity and directness of intention; they are Dutch in their oblivion to all interests except those of good drawing; they are Dutch in the beautiful quality of the workmanship. Examine the rich, simple drawing of that long coat or the side of that cab, and say if there is not something of the quality of a Terburg. Terburg is simple as a page of seventeenth-century prose; and in Keene there is the same deep, rich, classic simplicity. The material is different, but the feeling is the same. I might, of course, say Jan Steen; and is it not certain that both Terburg and Steen, working under the same conditions, would not have produced drawings very like Keene’s? And now, looking through the material deep into the heart of the thing, is it a paradox to say that No. 221 is in feeling and quality of workmanship a Dutch picture of the best time? The scene depicted is the honeymoon. The young wife sits by an open window full of sunlight, and the curtains likewise are drenched in the pure white light. How tranquil she is, how passive in her beautiful animal life! No complex passion stirs in that flesh; instinct drowses in her just as in an animal. With what animal passivity she looks up in her husband’s face! Look at that peaceful face, that high forehead, how clearly conceived and how complete is the rendering! How slight the means, how extraordinary the result! The sunlight floods the sweet face so exquisitively stupid, and her soul, and the room, and the very conditions of life of these people are revealed to us.
