by George Moore
In her art woman is always in evening dress: there are flowers in her hair, and her fan waves to and fro, and she wishes to sigh in the ear of him who sits beside her. Her mental nudeness is parallel with her low bodice, it is that and nothing more. She will make no sacrifice for her art; she will not tell the truth about herself as frankly as Jean-Jacques, nor will she observe life from the outside with the grave impersonal vision of Flaubert. In music women have done nothing, and in painting their achievement has been almost as slight. It is only in the inferior art — the art of acting — that women approach men. In that art it is not certain that they do not stand even higher.
Whatever women have done in painting has been done in France. England produces countless thousands of lady artists; twenty Englishwomen paint for one Frenchwoman, but we have not yet succeeded in producing two that compare with Madame Lebrun and Madame Berthe Morisot. The only two Englishwomen who have in painting come prominently before the public are Angelica Kauffman and Lady Butler. The first-named had the good fortune to live in the great age, and though her work is individually feeble, it is stamped with the charm of the tradition out of which it grew and was fashioned. Moreover, she was content to remain a woman in her art. She imitated Sir Joshua Reynolds to the best of her ability, and did all in her power to induce him to marry her. How she could have shown more wisdom it is difficult to see. Lady Butler was not so fortunate, either in the date of her birth, in her selection of a master, or her manner of imitating him. Angelica imitated as a woman should. She carried the art of Sir Joshua across her fan; she arranged and adorned it with ribbons and sighs, and was content with such modest achievement.
Lady Butler, however, thought she could do more than to sentimentalise with De Neuville’s soldiers. She adopted his method, and from this same standpoint tried to do better; her attitude towards him was the same as Rosa Bonheur’s towards Troyon; and the failure of Lady Butler was even greater than Rosa Bonheur’s. But perhaps the best instance I could select to show how impossible it is for women to do more than to accept the themes invented by men, and to decorate and arrange them according to their pretty feminine fancies, is the collection of Lady Waterford’s drawings now on exhibition at Lady Brownlow’s house in Carlton House Terrace.
Lady Waterford for many years — for more than a quarter of a century — has been spoken of as the one amateur of genius; and the greatest artists vied with each other as to which should pay the most extravagant homage to her talent. Mr. Watts seems to have distanced all competitors in praise of her, for in a letter of his quoted in the memoir prefixed to the catalogue, he says that she has exceeded all the great Venetian masters. It was nice of Mr. Watts to write such a letter; it was very foolish of Lady Brownlow to print it in the catalogue, for it serves no purpose except to draw attention to the obvious deficiencies of originality in Lady Waterford’s drawings. Nearly all of them are remarkable for facile grouping; and the colour is rich, somewhat heavy, but generally harmonious; the drawing is painfully conventional; it would be impossible to find a hand, an arm, a face that has been tenderly observed and rendered with any personal feeling or passion.
The cartoons are not better than any mediocre student of the Beaux-Arts could do — insipid parodies of the Venetian — whom she excels, according to Mr. Watts. When Lady Waterford attempted no more than a decorative ring of children dancing in a richly coloured landscape, or a group of harvesters seen against a rich decorative sky, such a design as might be brought across a fan, her talent is seen to best advantage; it is a fluent and facile talent, strangely unoriginal, but always sustained by taste acquired by long study of the Venetians, and by a superficial understanding of their genius.
Many times superior to Lady Waterford is Miss Armstrong — a lady in whose drawings of children we perceive just that light tenderness and fanciful imagination which is not of our sex. Perhaps memory betrays me; it is a long while since I have seen Miss Armstrong’s pastels, but my impression is that Miss Armstrong stands easily at the head of English lady artists — above Mrs. Swynnerton, whose resolute and distinguished talent was never more abundantly and strikingly manifested than in her picture entitled “Midsummer”, now hanging in the New Gallery. “Midsummer” is a fine piece of intellectual painting, but it proceeds merely from the brain; there is hardly anything of the painter’s nature in it; there are no surprising admissions in it; the painter never stood back abashed and asked herself if she should have confessed so much, if she should have told the world so much of what was passing in her intimate soul and flesh.
Impersonality in art really means mediocrity. If you have nothing to tell about yourself, or if courage be lacking in you to tell the truth, you are not an artist. Are women without souls, or is it that they dare not reveal their souls unadorned with the laces and ribbons of convention? Their memoirs are a tissue of lies, suppressions, and half-truths. George Sand must fain suppress all mention of her Italian journey with Musset, a true account of which would have been an immortal story; but of hypocritical hare-hearted allusions Rousseau and Casanova were not made; in their memoirs women never get further than some slight fingering of laces; and in their novels they are too subject to their own natures to attain the perfect and complete realisation of self, which the so-called impersonal method alone affords. Women astonish us as much by their want of originality as they do by their extraordinary powers of assimilation. I am thinking now of the ladies who marry painters, and who, after a few years of married life, exhibit work identical in execution with that of their illustrious husbands — Mrs. E. M. Ward, Madame Fantin-Latour, Mrs. Swan, Mrs. Alma-Tadema. How interesting these households must be! Immediately after breakfast husband and wife sit down at their easels. “Let me mix a tone for you, dear,” “I think I would put that up a little higher,” etc. In a word, what Manet used to call la peinture à quatre mains.
Nevertheless, among these well-intentioned ladies we find one artist of rare excellence — I mean Madame Lebrun. We all know her beautiful portrait of a woman walking forward, her hands in a muff. Seeing the engraving from a distance we might take it for a Romney; but when we approach, the quality of the painting visible through the engraving tells us that it belongs to the French school. In design the portrait is strangely like a Romney; it is full of all that brightness and grace, and that feminine refinement, which is a distinguishing characteristic of his genius, and which was especially impressed on my memory by the portrait of the lady in the white dress walking forward, her hands in front of her, the slight fingers pressed one against the other, exhibited this year in the exhibition of Old Masters in the Academy.
But if we deny that the portrait of the lady with the muff affords testimony as to the sex of the painter, we must admit that none but a woman could have conceived the portrait which Madame Lebrun painted of herself and her little daughter. The painting may be somewhat dry and hard, it certainly betrays none of the fluid nervous tendernesses and graces of the female temperament; but surely none but a woman and a mother could have designed that original and expressive composition; it was a mother who found instinctively that touching and expressive movement — the mother’s arms circled about her little daughter’s waist, the little girl leaning forward, her face resting on her mother’s shoulder. Never before did artist epitomise in a gesture all the familiar affection and simple persuasive happiness of home; the very atmosphere of an embrace is in this picture. And in this picture the painter reveals herself to us in one of the intimate moments of her daily life, the tender, wistful moment when a mother receives her growing girl in her arms, the adolescent girl having run she knows not why to her mother. These two portraits, both in the Louvre, are, I regret to say, the only pictures of Madame Lebrun that I am acquainted with. But I doubt if my admiration would be increased by a wider knowledge of her work. She seems to have said everything she had to say in these two pictures.
Madame Lebrun painted well, but she invented nothing, she failed to make her own of any special manner of seeing and
rendering things; she failed to create a style. Only one woman did this, and that woman is Madame Morisot, and her pictures are the only pictures painted by a woman that could not be destroyed without creating a blank, a hiatus in the history of art. True that the hiatus would be slight — insignificant if you will — but the insignificant is sometimes dear to us; and though nightingales, thrushes, and skylarks were to sing in King’s Bench Walk, I should miss the individual chirp of the pretty sparrow.
Madame Morisot’s note is perhaps as insignificant as a sparrow’s, but it is as unique and as individual a note. She has created a style, and has done so by investing her art with all her femininity; her art is no dull parody of ours: it is all womanhood — sweet and gracious, tender and wistful womanhood. Her first pictures were painted under the influence of Corot, and two of these early works were hung in the exhibition of her works held the other day at Goupil’s, Boulevard Montmartre. The more important was, I remember, a view of Paris seen from a suburb — a green railing and two loitering nursemaids in the foreground, the middle of the picture filled with the city faintly seen and faintly glittering in the hour of the sun’s decline, between four and six. It was no disagreeable or ridiculous parody of Corot; it was Corot feminised, Corot reflected in a woman’s soul, a woman’s love of man’s genius, a lake-reflected moon. But Corot’s influence did not endure. Through her sister’s marriage Madame Morisot came in contact with Manet, and she was quick to recognise him as being the greatest artist that France had produced since Delacroix.
Henceforth she never faltered in her allegiance to the genius of her great brother-in-law. True, that she attempted no more than to carry his art across her fan; but how adorably she did this! She got from him that handling out of which the colour flows joyous and bright as well-water, the handling that was necessary for the realisation of that dream of hers, a light world afloat in an irradiation — light trembling upon the shallows of artificial water, where swans and aquatic birds are plunging, and light skiffs are moored; light turning the summer trees to blue; light sleeping a soft and lucid sleep in the underwoods; light illumining the green summer of leaves where the diamond rain is still dripping; light transforming into jewellery the happy flight of bees and butterflies. Her swans are not diagrams drawn upon the water, their whiteness appears and disappears in the trembling of the light; and the underwood, how warm and quiet it is, and penetrated with the life of the summer; and the yellow-painted skiff, how happy and how real! Colours, tints of faint green and mauve passed lightly, a few branches indicated. Truly, the art of Manet transporté en éventail.
A brush that writes rather than paints, that writes exquisite notes in the sweet seduction of a perfect epistolary style, notes written in a boudoir, notes of invitation, sometimes confessions of love, the whole feminine heart trembling as a hurt bird trembles in a man’s hand. And here are yachts and blue water, the water full of the blueness of the sky; and the confusion of masts and rigging is perfectly indicated without tiresome explanation! The colour is deep and rich, for the values have been truly observed; and the pink house on the left is an exquisite note. No deep solutions, an art afloat and adrift upon the canvas, as a woman’s life floats on the surface of life. “My sister-in-law would not have existed without me,” I remember Manet saying to me in one of the long days we spent together in the Rue d’Amsterdam. True, indeed, that she would not have existed without him; and yet she has something that he has not — the charm of an exquisite feminine fancy, the charm of her sex. Madame Morisot is the eighteenth century quick with the nineteenth; she is the nineteenth turning her eyes regretfully looking back on the eighteenth.
Chaplin parodied the eighteenth century; in Madame Morisot something of its gracious spirit naturally resides; she is eighteenth century especially in her drawings; they are fluent and flowing; nowhere do we detect a measurement taken, they are free of tricks — that is to say of ignorance assuming airs of learning. That red chalk drawing of a naked girl, how simple, loose, and unaffected, how purged of the odious erudition of the modern studio. And her precious and natural remembrance of the great century, with all its love of youth and the beauties of youthful lines, is especially noticeable in the red chalk drawing of the girl wearing a bonnet, the veil falling and hiding her beautiful eyes. As I stood lost in admiration of this drawing, I heard a rough voice behind me: “C’est bien beau, n’est pas?” It was Claude Monet. “Yes, isn’t it superb?” I answered. “I wonder how much they’ll sell it for.” “I’ll soon find out that,” said Monet, and turning to the attendant he asked the question.
“Pour vous, sept cents cinquante francs.”
“C’est bien; il est à moi.”
This anecdote will give a better idea of the value of Berthe Morisot than seventy columns of mine or any other man’s criticism.
MR. STEER’S EXHIBITION.
1892.
Before sitting down to paint a landscape the artist must make up his mind whether he is going to use the trees, meadows, streams, and mountains before him as subject-matter for a decoration in the manner of the Japanese, or whether he will take them as subject-matter for the expression of a human emotion in the manner of Wilson and Millet. I offer no opinion which is the higher and which is the lower road; they may be wide apart, they may draw very close together, they may overlap so that it is difficult to say along which the artist is going; but, speaking roughly, there are but two roads, and it is necessary that the artist should choose between them. But this point has been fully discussed elsewhere, and I only allude to it here because I wish to assure my readers that Mr. Steer’s exhibition is not “Folkestone at low tide” and “Folkestone at high tide”.
In all the criticisms I have seen of the present exhibition it has been admitted that Mr. Steer takes a foremost place in what is known as the modern movement. I also noticed that it was admitted that Mr. Steer is a born artist. The expression, from constant use, has lost its true significance; yet to find another phrase that would express the idea more explicitly would be difficult; the born artist, meaning the man in whom feeling and expression are one.
The growth of a work of art is as inexplicable as that of a flower. We know that there are men who feel deeply and who understand clearly what a work of art should be; but when they attempt to create, their efforts are abortive. Their ideas, their desires, their intentions, their plans, are excellent; but the passage between the brain and the canvas, between the brain and the sheet of paper, is full of shipwrecking reefs, and the intentions of these men do not correspond in the least with their execution. Noticing our blank faces, they explain their ideas in front of their works. They meant this, they meant that. Inwardly we answer, “All you say is most interesting; but why didn’t you put all that into your picture, into your novel?”
Then Mr. Steer is not an abortive genius, for his ideas do not come to utter shipwreck in the perilous passage; they often lose a spar or two, they sometimes appear in a more or less dismantled condition, but they retain their masts; they come in with some yards of canvas still set, and the severest criticism that can be passed on them is, “With a little better luck that would have been a very fine thing indeed.” And not infrequently Mr. Steer’s pictures correspond very closely with the mental conception in which they originated; sometimes little or nothing has been lost as the idea passed from the brain to the canvas, and it is on account of these pictures that we say that Mr. Steer is a born artist. This once granted, the question arises: is this born artist likewise a great artist — will he formulate his sensation, and give us a new manner of feeling and seeing, or will he merely succeed in painting some beautiful pictures when circumstances and the mood of the moment combine in his favour? This is a question which all who visit the exhibition of this artist’s work, now on view in the Goupil Galleries, will ask themselves. They will ask if this be the furthest limit to which he may go, or if he will discover a style entirely his own which will enable him to convey all his sensation of life upon the canvas.
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bsp; That Mr. Steer’s drawing does not suggest a future draughtsman seems to matter little, for we remember that colour, and not form, is the impulse that urges and inspires him. Mr. Steer draws well enough to take a high place if he can overcome more serious defects. His greatest peril seems to me to be an uncontrollable desire to paint in the style of the last man whose work has interested him. At one time it was only in his most unguarded moments that he could see a landscape otherwise than as Monet saw it; a year or two later it was Whistler who dictated certain schemes of colour, certain harmonious arrangements of black; and the most distressing symptom of all is that Mr. Brabazon could not hold an exhibition of some very nice tints of rose and blue without inspiring Mr. Steer to go and swish water-colour about in the same manner. Mr. Steer has the defect of his qualities; his perceptions are naïve: and just as he must have thought seven years ago that all modern landscape-painters must be more or less like Monet, he must have thought last summer that all modern water-colour must be more or less like Mr. Brabazon. This is doubly unfortunate, because Mr. Steer is only good when he is Steer, and nothing but Steer.
How much we should borrow, and how we should borrow, are questions which will agitate artists for all time. It is certain, however, that one of the most certain signs of genius is the power to take from others and to assimilate. How much did Rubens take from Titian? How much did Mr. Whistler take from the Japanese? Almost everything in Mr. Whistler already existed in art. In the National Gallery the white stocking in the Philip reminds us of the white stockings in the portrait of Miss Alexander. In the British Museum we find the shadows that he transferred from Rembrandt to his own etchings. Degas took his drawing from Ingres and his colour — that lovely brown! — from Poussin. But, notwithstanding their vast borrowings, Rubens is always Rubens, Whistler is always Whistler, and Degas is always Degas. Alexander took a good deal, too, but he too remained always Alexander. We must conquer what we take. But what Mr. Steer takes often conquers him; he is often like one suffering from a weak digestion, he cannot assimilate. I must except, however, that very beautiful picture, “Two Yachts lying off Cowes”. Under a deepening sky of mauve the yachts lie, their lights and rigging showing through the twilight. We may say that this picture owes something to Mr. Whistler; but the debt is not distressing; it does not strike the eye; it does not prevent us from seeing the picture — a very beautiful piece of decoration in a high key of colour — a picture which it would be difficult to find fault with. It is without fault; the intention of the artist was a beautiful one, and it has been completely rendered. I like quite as well “The Casino, Boulogne”, the property, I note with some interest, of Mr. Humphry Ward, art critic of the Times. Mr. Humphry Ward must write conventional commonplace, otherwise he could not remain art critic of the Times, so it is pleasant to find that he is withal an excellent judge of a picture. The picture, I suppose, in a very remote and distant way, may be said to be in the style of Wilson. Again a successful assimilation. The buildings stand high up, they are piled high up in the picture, and a beautiful blue envelops sky, sea, and land. Nos. 1 and 2 show Mr. Steer at his best: that beautiful blue, that beautiful mauve, is the optimism of painting. Such colour is to the colourist what the drug is to the opium-eater: nothing matters, the world is behind us, and we dream on and on, lost in an infinity of suggestion. This quality, which, for want of a better expression, I call the optimism of painting, is a peculiar characteristic of Mr. Steer’s work. We find it again in “Children Paddling”. Around the long breakwater the sea winds, filling the estuary, or perchance recedes, for the incoming tide is noisier; a delicious, happy, opium blue, the blue of oblivion…. Paddling in the warm sea-water gives oblivion to those children. They forget their little worries in the sensation of sea and sand, as I forget mine in that dreamy blue which fades and deepens imperceptibly, like a flower from the intense heart to the delicate edge of the petals.
