Modern Painting Part 12

The picture represents M. Deboutin in the cafe of the _Nouvelle Athenes_ He has come down from his studio for breakfast, and he will return to his dry-points when he has finished his pipe. I have known M. Deboutin a great number of years, and a more sober man does not exist; and Mr. Crane's accusations of drunkenness might as well be made against Mr. Bernard Shaw. When, hypocritically, I said the picture was a lesson, I referred to the woman, who happens to be sitting next to M. Deboutin. Mr. Crane, Mr. Richmond, and others have jumped to the conclusion that M. Deboutin has come to the cafe with the woman, and that they are "boozing" together. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Deboutin always came to the cafe alone, as did Manet, Degas, Duranty. Deboutin is thinking of his dry-points; the woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she would probably answer, _"je suis a la coule"_. But there is no implication of drunkenness in the phrase. In England this cla.s.s of woman is constantly drunk, in France hardly ever; and the woman Degas has painted is typical of her cla.s.s, and she wears the habitual expression of her cla.s.s. And the interest of the subject, from Degas' point of view, lies in this strange contrast--the man thinking of his dry-points, the woman thinking, as the phrase goes, of nothing at all.

_Au Cafe_--that is the t.i.tle of the picture. How simple, how significant! And how the picture gains in meaning when the web of false melodrama that a couple of industrious spiders have woven about it is brushed aside!

I now turn to the more interesting, and what I think will prove the more instructive, part of my task--the a.n.a.lysis of the art criticism of Mr. Richmond and Mr. Crane.

Mr. Richmond says "it is not painting at all". We must understand therefore that the picture is void of all accomplishment--composition, drawing, and handling. We will take Mr. Richmond's objections in their order. The subject-matter out of which the artist extracted his composition was a man and woman seated in a cafe furnished with marble tables. The first difficulty the artist had to overcome was the symmetry of the lines of the tables. Not only are they exceedingly ugly from all ordinary points of view, but they cut the figures in two. The simplest way out of the difficulty would be to place one figure on one side of a table, the other on the other side, and this composition might be balanced by a waiter seen in the distance. That would be an ordinary arrangement of the subject. But the ingenuity with which Degas selects his point of view is without parallel in the whole history of art. And this picture is an excellent example. One line of tables runs up the picture from left to right, another line of tables, indicated by three parts of one table, strikes right across the foreground. The triangle thus formed is filled by the woman's dress, which is darker than the floor and lighter than the leather bench on which both figures are seated. Looking still more closely into the composition, we find that it is made of several perspectives --the dark perspective of the bench, the light perspective of the part.i.tion behind, on which the light falls, and the rapid perspective of the marble table in the foreground. The man is high up on the right-hand corner, the woman is in the middle of the picture, and Degas has been careful to place her in front of the opening between the tables, for by so doing he was able to carry his half-tint right through the picture. The empty s.p.a.ce on the left, so characteristic of Degas's compositions, admirably balances the composition, and it is only relieved by the stone matchbox, and the newspaper thrown across the opening between the tables. Everywhere a perspective, and these are combined with such strange art that the result is synthetic. A beautiful dissonant rhythm, always symphonic _coulant longours de source_; an exasperated vehemence and a continual desire of novelty penetrated and informed by a severely cla.s.sical spirit--that is my reading of this composition.

"The qualities admired by this new school are certainly the mirrors of that side of the nineteenth-century development most opposed to fine painting, or, say, fine craftsmanship. Hurry, rush, fashion, are the enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works are produced. Hence the admiration for an art fully answering to a demand. No doubt impressionism is an expression in painting of the deplorable side of modern life."

After "forty years of the study of the best art of various schools that the galleries of Europe display", Mr. Richmond mistakes Degas for an impressionist (I use the word in its accepted sense); he follows the lead of the ordinary art critic who includes Degas among the impressionists because Degas paints dancing lessons, and because he has once or twice exhibited with Monet and his followers. The best way--possibly the only way--to obtain any notion of the depth of the abyss on which we stand will be by a plain statement of the facts.

When Ingres fell down in the fit from which he never recovered, it was Degas who carried him out of his studio. Degas had then been working with Ingres only a few months, but that brief while convinced Ingres of his pupil's genius, and it is known that he believed that it would be Degas who would carry on the cla.s.sical tradition of which he was a great exponent. Degas has done this, not as Flandren tried to, by reproducing the externality of the master's work, but as only a man of genius could, by the application of the method to new material.

Degas's early pictures, "The Spartan Youths" and "Semiramis building the Walls of Babylon". are pure Ingres. To this day Degas might be very fairly described as _un pet.i.t Ingres_. Do we not find Ingres'

penetrating and intense line in the thin straining limbs of Degas's ballet-girls, in the heavy shoulders of his laundresses bent over the ironing table, and in the coa.r.s.e forms of his housewives who sponge themselves in tin baths? The vulgar, who see nothing of a work of art but its external side, will find it difficult to understand that the art of "La Source" and of Degas's c.u.mbersome housewives is the same.

To the vulgar, Bouguereau and not Degas is the interpreter of the cla.s.sical tradition.

'Hurry, rush, fashion, are the enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works are produced.'

For the sake of his beloved drawing Degas has for many years locked himself into his studio from early morning till late at night, refusing to open even to his most intimate friends. Coming across him one morning in a small cafe, where he went at midday to eat a cutlet, I said, "My dear friend, I haven't seen you for years; when may I come?" The answer I received was: "You're an old friend, and if you'll make an appointment I'll see you. But I may as well tell you that for the last two years no one has been in my studio." On the whole it is perhaps as well that I declined to make an appointment, for another old friend who went, and who stayed a little longer than he was expected to stay, was thrown down the staircase. And that staircase is spiral, as steep as any ladder. Until he succeeded in realising his art Degas's tongue was the terror of artistic Paris; his solitary days, the strain on the nerves that the invention and composition of his art, so entirely new and original, entailed, wrecked his temper, and there were moments when his friends began to dread the end that his striving might bring about. But with the realisation of his artistic ideal his real nature returned, and he is now full of kind words for the feeble, and full of indulgence for the slightest artistic effort.

The story of these terrible years of striving is written plainly enough on every canvas signed by Degas; yet Mr. Richmond imagines him skipping about airily from cafe to cafe, dashing off little impressions. In another letter Mr. Richmond says, 'Perfect craftsmanship, such as was Van Eyck's, Holbein's, Bellini's, Michael Angelo's, becomes more valuable as time goes on.' It is interesting to hear that Mr. Richmond admires Holbein's craftsmanship, but it will be still more interesting if he will explain how and why the head of the old Bohemian in the picture ent.i.tled "L'Absinthe" is inferior to Holbein. The art of Holbein, as I understand it--and if I do not understand it rightly I shall be delighted to have my mistake explained to me--consists of measurements and the power of observing and following an outline with remorseless precision. Now Degas in his early manner was frequently this. His portrait of his father listening to Pagan singing whilst he accompanied himself on the guitar is pure Holbein. Whether it is worse or better than Holbein is a matter of individual opinion; but to affect to admire Holbein and to decline to admire the portrait I speak of is--well, incomprehensible. The portrait of Deboutin in the picture ent.i.tled "L'Absinthe" is a later work, and is not quite so nearly in the manner of Holbein; but it is quite nearly enough to allow me to ask Mr. Richmond to explain how, and why it is inferior to Holbein. Inferior is not the word I want, for Mr. Richmond holds Holbein to be one of the greatest painters the world ever knew, and Degas to be hardly a painter at all.

For three weeks the pens of art critics, painters, designers, and engravers have been writing about this picture--about this rough Bohemian who leans over the cafe table with his wooden pipe fixed fast between his teeth, with his large soft felt hat on the back of his head, upheld there by a shock of bushy hair, with his large battered face grown around with scanty, unkempt beard, illuminated by a fixed and concentrated eye which tells us that his thoughts are in pursuit of an idea--about one of the finest specimens of the art of this century--and what have they told us? Mr. Richmond mistakes the work for some hurried sketch--impressionism--and practically declares the painting to be worthless. Mr. Walter Crane says it is only fit for a sociological museum or for an ill.u.s.trated tract in a temperance propaganda; he adds some remarks about "a new Adam and Eve and a paradise of unnatural selection" which escape my understanding. An engraver said that the picture was a vulgar subject vulgarly painted.

Another set of men said the picture was wonderful, extraordinary, perfect, complete, excellent. But on neither side was any attempt made to explain why the picture was bad or why the picture was excellent.

The picture is excellent, but why is it excellent? Because the scene is like a real scene pa.s.sing before your eyes? Because nothing has been omitted that might have been included, because nothing has been included that might have been omitted? Because the painting is clear, smooth, and limpid and pleasant to the eye? Because the colour is harmonious, and though low in tone, rich and strong? Because each face is drawn in its distinctive lines, and each tells the tale of instincts and of race? Because the clothing is in its accustomed folds and is full of the individuality of the wearer? We look on this picture and we ask ourselves how it is that amongst the tens and hundreds of thousands of men who have painted men and women in their daily occupations, habits, and surroundings, no one has said so much in so small a s.p.a.ce, no one has expressed himself with that simplicity which draws all veils aside, and allows us to look into the heart of nature.

Where is the drawing visible except in the result? How beautifully concise it is, and yet it is large, supple, and true without excess of reality. Can you detect anywhere a measurement? Do you perceive a base, a fixed point from which the artist calculated and compared his drawing? That hat, full of the ill-usage of the studio, hanging on the shock of bushy hair, the perspective of those shoulders, and the round of the back, determining the exact width and thickness of the body, the movement of the arm leaning on the table, and the arm perfectly in the sleeve, and the ear and the shape of the neck hidden in the shadow of the hat and hair, and the battered face, sparely sown with an ill-kempt beard, illuminated by a fixed look which tells us that his thoughts are in pursuit of an idea--this old Bohemian smoking his pipe, does he not seem to have grown out of the canvas as naturally and mysteriously as a herb or plant? By the side of this drawing do not all the drawings in the gallery of English, French, Belgian, and Scandinavian seem either childish, ignorant-timed, or presumptuous? By the side of this picture do not all the other pictures in the gallery seem like little painted images?

Compared with this drawing, would not Holbein seem a little geometrical? Again I ask if you can detect in any outline or accent a fixed point from whence the drawing was measured, calculated, and constructed. In the drawing of all the other painters you trace the method and you take note of the knowledge through which the model has been seen and which has, as it were, dictated to the eye what it should see. But in Degas the science of the drawing is hidden from us--a beautiful flexible drawing almost impersonal, bending to and following the character, as naturally as the banks follow the course of their river.

I stop, although I have not said everything. To complete my study of this picture we should have to examine that smooth, clean, supple painting of such delicate and yet such a compact tissue; we should have to study that simple expressive modelling; we should have to consider the resources of that palette, reduced almost to a monochrome and yet so full of colour. I stop, for I think I have said enough to rouse if not to fully awaken suspicion in Mr. Richmond and Mr. Crane of the profound science concealed in a picture about which I am afraid they have written somewhat thoughtlessly.

In the midst of a somewhat foolish and ignorant argument regarding the morality and the craftsmanship of a masterpiece, the right of the new art criticism to adversely criticise the work of Royal Academicians has been called into question. I cull the following from the columns of the _Westminster Gazette_;--

'Their words are practically the same; their praise and blame are similarly inspired; the means they employ to gain their object identical. So much we can see for ourselves. As for their object and their _bona-fides_, they concern me not. It is what they do, not what they are, that is the question here. What they do is to form a caucus in art criticism, and owing to their vehemence and the limitation of their aim, a caucus which is increasing in influence, and, to the best of my belief, doing cruel injustice to many great artists, and much injury to English art. It is for this reason, and this reason only, that I have taken up my parable on the subject. I have in vain endeavoured to induce those whose words would come with far greater authority than mine to do so. I went personally to the presidents of the two greatest artistic bodies in the kingdom to ask them to speak or write on the subject, but I found their view to be that such action would be misconstrued, and would in their position be unbecoming.'

The meaning of all this is that the ferret is in the hole and the rats have begun to squeak already. Soon they will come hopping out of St.

John's Wood Avenue, so make ready your sticks and stones.

In April 1892 I wrote: 'The position of the Academy is as impregnable as Gibraltar. But Gibraltar itself was once captured by a small company of resolute men, and if ever there exist in London six resolute art critics, each capable of distinguishing between a bad picture and a good one, each determined at all costs to tell the truth, and if these six critics will keep in line, then, and not till then, some of the reforms so urgently needed, and so often demanded from the Academy, will be granted. I do not mean that these six critics will bring the Academicians on their knees by writing fulminating articles on the Academy. Such attacks were as idle as whistling for rain on the house-tops. The Academicians laugh at such attacks, relying on the profound indifference of the public to artistic questions. But there is another kind of attack which the Academicians may not ignore, and that is true criticism. If six newspapers were to tell the simple truth about the canvases which the Academicians will exhibit next month, the Academicians would soon cry out for quarter and grant all necessary reforms.'

I have only now to withdraw the word "reform". The Academy cannot reform, and must be destroyed. The Academy has tried to reform, and has failed. Thirty years ago the pre-Raphaelite movement nearly succeeded in bringing about an effectual shipwreck. But when Mr.

Holman Hunt went to Italy, special terms were offered and accepted.

The election of Millais and Watts saved the Academy, and instead of the Academy, it was the genius of one of England's greatest painters that was destroyed. "Ophelia", "Autumn Leaves", and "St. Agnes' Eve"

are pictures that will hold their own in any gallery among pictures of every age and every country. But fathomless is the abyss which separates them from Sir John Millais' academic work.

The Academy is a distinctly commercial enterprise. Has not Sir John Millais said, in an interview, that the hanging committee at Burlington House selects the pictures that will draw the greatest number of shillings. The Academy has been subventioned by the State to the extent of three hundred thousand pounds, and that money has been employed in arrogant commercialism. The Academy holds a hundred thousand pounds in trust, left by Mr. Chantry for the furtherance of art in this country; and this money is spent on the purchase of pictures by impecunious Academicians, and the collection formed with this money is one of the seven horrors of civilisation. The Academy has tolerated genius when it was popular, it has trampled upon genius when it was unpopular; and the business of the new art criticism is to rid art of the incubus. The Academy must be destroyed, and when that is accomplished the other Royal inst.i.tutes will follow as a matter of course. The object of the new art criticism is to give free trade to art.

LONG AGO IN ITALY.

Come to the New Gallery. We shall pa.s.s out of sight of flat dreary London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pa.s.s out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and gold, and purple raiment; of beautiful youths crowned with flowers; of fabulous blue landscape and delicate architecture. Know ye the land?

Botticelli is king there, king of clasped hands and almond-eyed Madonnas. It was he who conceived and designed that enigmatic Virgin's face; it was he who placed that long-fingered hand on the thigh of the Infant G.o.d; it was he who coiled that heavy hair about that triangle of neck and interwove it with pearls; it was he who drew the graceful lace over the head-dress, and painted it in such innumerable delicacy of fold that we wonder and are fain to believe that it is but the magic of an instant's hallucination. Know ye the land? Filippo Lippi is prince there, prince of angel youths, fair hair crowned with fair flowers; they stand round a tall throne with strings of coral and precious stones in their hands. It was Filippo Lippi who composed that palette of grey soft pearly pink; it was he who placed that beautiful red in the right-hand corner, and carried it with such enchanting harmony through the yellow raiment of the angel youth, echoing it in a subdued key in the vesture which the Virgin wears under her blue garment, and by means of the red coral which decorates the tall throne he carried it round the picture; it was he, too, who filled those angel eyes with pa.s.sion such as awakens in heaven at the touch of wings, at the sound of citherns and cintoles.

Know ye the land where Botticelli and Filippo Lippi dreamed immortal dreams? Know ye the land, Italy in the fifteenth century? Exquisite angel faces were their visions by day and night, and their thoughts were mystic landscapes and fantastic architecture; aureoles, roses, pearls, and rich embroideries were parcel of their habitual sense; and the decoration of a surface with beautiful colour was their souls'

desire. Of truth of effect and local colour they knew nothing, and cared nothing. Beauty for beauty's sake was the first article of their faith. They measured a profile with relentless accuracy, and followed its outline unflinchingly, their intention was no more than to produce a likeness of the lady who sat posing for her portrait, but some miracle saved them from base naturalism. The humblest, equally with the n.o.blest dreamer, was preserved from it; and that their eyes naturally saw more beautifully than ours seems to be the only explanation. Ugliness must have always existed; but Florentine eyes did not see ugliness. Or did their eyes see it, and did they disdain it? Do they owe their art to a wise festheticism, or to a fortunate limitation of sight? These are questions that none may answer, but which rise up in our mind and perplex us when we enter the New Gallery; for verily it would seem, from the dream pictures there, that a time once existed upon earth when the world was fair as a garden, and life was a happy aspiration. In the fifteenth century the world seems to have been made of gold, jewellery, pictures, embroidered stuffs, statues, and engraved weapons; in the fifteenth century the world seems to have been inhabited only by n.o.bles and prelates; and the only buildings that seem to have existed were palaces and cathedrals. Then Art seemed for all men, and life only for architecture, painting, carving, and engraving long rapiers; and length of time for monks to illuminate great missals in the happy solitude of their cells, and for nuns to weave embroideries and to st.i.tch jewelled vestments.

The Florentines loved their children as dearly as we do ours; but in their pictures there is but the Divine Child. They loved girls and gallantries as well as we do; but in their pictures there are but the Virgin and a few saints.

History tells us that wars, ma.s.sacres, and persecutions were frequent in the fifteenth century; but in its art we learn no more of the political than we do of the domestic life of the century. The Virgin and Child were sufficient inspiration for hundreds of painters. Now she is in full-face, now in three-quarter face, now in profile. In this picture she wears a blue cloak, in that picture she is clad in a grey. She is alone with the Child in a bower of tall roses, or she is seated on a high throne. Perhaps the painter has varied the composition by the introduction of St. John leaning forward with clasped hands; or maybe he has introduced a group of angels, as Filippo Lippi has done. The throne is sometimes high, sometimes low; but such slight alteration is enough for a new picture. And several generations of painters seem to have lived and died believing that their art was to all practical and artistic purposes limited to the continual variation of this theme.

Among these painters Botticelli was the incontestable master; but about him crowd hundreds of pictures, pictures rather than names.

Imagine a number of workmen anxious to know how they should learn to paint well, to paint with brilliancy, with consistency, with ease, and with lasting colours. Imagine a collection of gold ornaments, jewels, and enamels, in which we can detect the skill of the goldsmith, of the painter of stained-gla.s.s, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of missals; the inspiration is grave and monastic, the destination a palace or a cathedral, the effect dazzling; and out of this miraculous handicraft Filippo Lippi is always distinct, soft as the dawn, mysterious as a flower, less vigorous but more illusive than Botticelli, and so strangely personal that while looking at him we are absorbed.

To differentiate between the crowd of workmen that surrounded Filippo Lippi and Botticelli were impossible. They painted beautiful things because they lived in an age in which ugliness hardly existed, or was not as visible as it is now; they were content to merge their personalities in an artistic formula; none sought to invent a personality which did not exist in himself. Employing without question a method of drawing and of painting that was common to all of them, they worked in perfect sympathy, almost in collaboration. Plagiarism was then a virtue; they took from each other freely; and the result is a collective rather than individual inspirations. Now and then genius breaks through, as a storm breaks a spell of summer weather. "The Virgin and Child, with St. Clare and St. Agatha", lent by Mrs. Austin and the trustees of the late J. T. Austin, is one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen. The temperament of the painter, his special manner of feeling and seeing, is strangely, almost audaciously, affirmed in the mysterious sensuality of the angels'

faces; the painter lays bare a rare and remote corner of his soul; something has been said that was never said before, and never has been said so well since. But if the expression given to these angels is distinctive, it is extraordinarily enhanced by the beauty of the colour. Indeed, the harmony of the colour-scheme is inseparable from the melodious expressiveness of the eyes. Look at the gesture of the hand on the right; is not the a.s.sociation of ideas strangely intimate, curious, and profound?

But come and let us look at a real Botticelli, a work which convinces at the first glance by the extraordinary expressiveness of the drawing, by the originality of the design, by the miraculous handicraft; let us look at the "Virgin and Child and St. John", lent by Messrs. Colnaghi.

It is a panel some 36 by 25 inches, almost filled by a life-size three-quarter-length figure of the Virgin. She is seated on the right, and holds the Infant Saviour in her arms. In the foreground on the left there is a book and cushion, behind which St. John stands, his hands clasped, bearing a cross. Never was a head designed with more genius than that strange Virgin, ecstatic, mysterious, sphinx-like; with half-closed eyes, she bends her face to meet her G.o.d's kiss. In this picture Botticelli sought to realise the awfulness of the Christian mystery: the Mother leans to the kiss of her Son--her Son, who is likewise her G.o.d, and her brain is dim with its ecstasy. She is perturbed and overcome; the kiss is in her brain, and it trembles on her lips. You who have not seen the picture will think that this description is but the tale of the writer who reads his fancies into the panel before him. But the intention of the painter did not outstrip the power of expression which his fingers held. He expressed what I say he expressed, and more perfectly, more suggestively, than any words. And how? It will be imagined that it was by means of some illusive line that Botticelli rendered the very touch and breath of this extraordinary kiss; by that illusive line which Degas employs in his expressions of the fugitive and the evanescent. How great, therefore, is our surprise when we look into the picture to find that the mystery and ecstasy of this kiss are expressed by a hard, firm, dark line.

And the sensation of this strange ecstatic kiss pervades the entire composition; it is embodied in the hand placed so reverently on the thigh of the Infant G.o.d and in the eyes of St. John, who watches the divine mystery which is being accomplished. On St. John's face there is earthly reverence and awe; on Christ's face, though it is drawn in rigid outline, though it looks as if it were stamped out of iron, there is universal love, cloudlike and ineffable; and Christ's knees are drawn close, and the hand of the Virgin holds them close; and through the hand come bits of draperies exquisitely designed. Indeed, the distribution of line through the picture is as perfect as the distribution of colour; the form of the blue cloak is as perfect as the colour, and the green cape falls from the shoulder, satisfying both senses; the crimson vesture which she wears underneath her cloak is extraordinarily pure, and balances the crimson cloak which St. John wears. But these beauties are subordinate to the beauty of the Virgin's head. How grand it is in style! How strange and enigmatic!

And in the design of that head Botticelli has displayed all his skill.

The fair hair is covered with delicate gauze edged with lace, and overcoming the difficulties of that most rebellious of all mediums--tempera!--his brush worked over the surface, fulfilling his slightest thought, realising all the transparency of gauze, the intricacy of lace, the brightness of crimson silk, the very gravity of the embossed binding of the book, the sway and texture of every drapery, the gold of the tall cross, and the darker gold of the aureole high up in the picture, set against a strip of Florentine sky.