Outdoor Sketching Part 3

Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors--the art of depicting nature on a sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water--it will be well to remind you that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times.

A few weeks ago, in the library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the American Academy in Rome, I saw one of the earliest water-colors in existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate, and, although some thousands of years old, still retained its color and remarkable brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object being a girl of wonderful grace.

The present art of water-color painting, with a sheet of white paper as background instead of the permanent stone, is, however, but little more than one hundred and fifty years old, and owes its existence largely to the men of the English school.

Mr. C. E. Hughes, in his delightful book on "Early English Water Color," confined this English school to the men born between the years 1720 and 1820.

In this group he places the great Gainsborough, who from 1760 to 1774 worked "in charcoal and water-color on tinted paper," which he said he "loved to dash off of an evening, and which dazzled the fine ladies and gentlemen who frequented the select watering-place of Bath," where he was then living.

Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers Sanby, Thomas Hearne, Thomas Malton, Samuel Scott, and a few others, all known as the eighteenth-century painters.

These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died at twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first saw the light in the same year, and on the day on which all great Englishmen should be born--namely, April 23--a day dedicated to St.

George and the birthday of William Shakespeare.

Girtin and Turner worked together. Girtin, measured by the standard of to-day, was an extreme impressionist, leaving behind him sketches dashed in with an appearance of freedom which Peter DeWint and David c.o.x might have envied when in after years they were at the height of their power. Turner, on the contrary, devoted his time to acquiring that triumphant grasp of detail which caused him to be known in his earlier life as an extreme realist.

The change in Turner's work--the broader brush--came in his later years when oil became his medium of expression, in which, no doubt, his ability to note and yet sacrifice all unnecessary detail was a potent factor.

A list of Englishmen greatly prized in their day now follows. Such men as John Varly, Gilpin, Glover, William Havell (all of whom during some part of their careers were members of the first Water Color Society formed in England, in 1804, which body still survives in the old Water Color Society whose rooms are still open on Pall Mall East) rose into prominence, their works finding places both in private and public collections.

This society was in turn succeeded by the New Society of Painters in Miniature and Water Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out of existence in 1812--a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of the older organization under the joint t.i.tle of the Oil and Water Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the birth of the a.s.sociation now known as the Royal Inst.i.tute for Painters in Water Colors.

Other names now confront us, among them two men, David c.o.x and Peter DeWint, who in their day were considered masters of the medium. These last struck a new note in water-color, or rather a new technic in its handling. What Ruskin, the realist, in his "Modern Painters" describes as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon by both teachers and students as the one and only means by which white paper could be properly stained. This method, to quote from a loyal believer in the English transparent school, and whose enthusiasm is delightful, was the laying on of the color in washes which filled certain definite s.p.a.ces indicated by a pen-and-ink outline.

These washes would indicate, say, a distant tree with a preliminary tint and a subsequent elaboration; he would do it all in one process, giving his blot an irregular edge and allowing the color to acc.u.mulate where the shadows required it. His elaborative touches elsewhere were of the same nature. They were brush blots as distinct from washes. To this, I think, we may attribute on a.n.a.lysis the freedom of handling which--though each man has his distinctive method--is characteristic of both c.o.x and DeWint. If we add to these two methods of using the brush a third--its manipulation as though it were a pen--we shall have all the fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all modern water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the color into the grain of the paper. A fifth--a supplementary one--is scratching out. Last is the ignominy of the stipple--the wetting of the brush in the mouth, a technic entirely dependent upon the quant.i.ty of saliva the student can spare for his work. Almost every early wash water-color in existence can be cla.s.sified according to the employment in its making of some or all of these means.

In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century, we have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings, the detail of his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington, really a great man; Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Roberts; James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood and whose intimates were d.i.c.kens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color Societies.

As for our own progress in the art, the subject, of course, is too well known for long discussion. Our oldest society, the American Water Color Society, held its first public exhibition in the National Academy of Design in New York in 1867, a date always remembered by me with infinite pride and pleasure, for upon the walls of the smallest room close up under the roof was hung my first exhibited water-color--the only one of my three the hanging committee were good enough to accept. Two years later--I am happy to say--in 1869, I was elected a member, and I am further happy to say that I am still in good standing and in high-hanging, and have so continued from that day down to the present time--a trifle of some forty-six years.

As to my compatriots, I can truthfully say that its membership covers some of the great water-colorists of our own or any other time, both here and abroad--men entirely free to do as they pleased, working in anything and all things so long as, to use their own expression, they "get there," handling body color, in a veil of silver-gray as an overwash or squeezed in chunks from a tube; undertones of charcoal gray, overtones of pastel--anything for _quality_.

Their names are legion: the late E. A. Abbey, Walter Palmer, Chase, the late Robert Blum, F. S. Church, Cooper, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, the two Smillies, Childe Ha.s.sam, Keller, Murphy, Nicoll, Potthast, the late Henry Smith, etc., etc.

These are but a haphazard choice of the men whose work shows the widest ranges in selection, composition, ma.s.s, and technic, and who, in the world of water-color painting, are masters of the medium.

As to our progenitors, the English water-color school--and I make the statement with every respect for their high accomplishments--while I believe we are indebted to them for the very existence of the art itself, I must say that our own men and art-lovers the world over would have been vastly benefited had these Englishmen allowed themselves a little more freedom in their methods and not followed so blindly the traditions of their past.

That we broke away so early is as much a question of race as of training. The last idea that enters the heads of our own men is that they want either to paint or to draw like somebody else. They all want to paint like themselves, or they do not want to paint at all. They are so many art sponges. They go abroad, wander about the Grosvenor and the exhibitions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon and shops, and so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a new idea of grouping or ma.s.s or color scheme there, and then, having thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them; but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German master--never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form of flattery--imitation.

Nor do many of them find their subjects abroad--a habit practised these many years by your humble speaker, whose only excuse is that he _must_ paint, no matter where he is, and that his life in the summer-time is dominated by his two children, both exiles, and more exactingly still in late years by two little grandboys who have not as yet crossed the ocean. No, these young American painters, with hardly an exception, find their subjects at home, and they choose wisely.

And just here it can be said that if we are ever to have a school that will leave its impress on the art of the world, the task will be the easier if our men find their subjects at home--if they will show our own people the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of the material that lies under their very eyes, and also teach those fellows on the other side to respect us, both because we can paint and because we have the things to paint from. With a mountain and river scenery unrivalled on the globe; with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean; with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height the trees of all other lands are but toothpicks; with plains ending in films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls; with every type of the human race blended in our own, or distinct as are the woodman of Maine and the soft-eyed mulatto of Louisiana; with a history filled with traditions most romantic--Aztec, Indian, and negro; with women who move like Greek G.o.ddesses and children whose faces are divine, why go away from home to find something to paint?

Winslow Homer never did, and that's why his work will live when the painters of Egyptian harems, Spanish dancers, and Dutch and Venetian boats and palaces are forgotten.

To take a specific example or two, what subject, for instance, is more worthy of a great master's brush than Homer's "Undertow," two half-drowned young bathers locked in each other's arms, the two beachmen dragging them clear of the mighty, blue-green wave curving behind them? Here is a subject of almost weekly occurrence on our coast. Who ever thought of painting it before? And that marvellous picture of "The Cotton Pickers." This, to me, was the first clear note Homer had sounded. The "Prisoners to the Front," painted just after the war, was a strong, realistic picture, true and forceful in color and composition, and, of course, admirable in drawing, but that was all. It told its story at once, and having heard it to the end you acknowledged its truth and went away content. But "The Cotton Pickers"

left something more in your mind. The gray dawn of the morning dimly lighted up a field of cotton, the negro quarters on the horizon line; dotted here and there, bending over the bolls, were groups of negroes, singly and in pairs, filling their bags; in the foreground walked two young negro girls, the foremost a dark mulatto--the whole story of Southern slavery written in every line of her patient, uncomplaining face.

This picture alone placed Homer in the first rank of American painters of his day, and he has never lost this place, for not only was the picture all it should be in composition and ma.s.s, but, unlike many of Homer's pictures of an earlier period, it was deliciously gray and cool in tone. It places him also in the front rank of the painters of our time. Jules Breton never gave us anything more pleasing, and never anything stronger in drawing, more true to life, or more poetic in conception and treatment. I mention Breton because, of the men on the other side, he is the only one who affects, so to speak, a similar line of subjects. Breton loves his peasants and paints them as if he did. Homer loved his subjects entirely in the same spirit. How unequally the two men have been rewarded you all know. An all-wise American who some years ago offered $40,000 for a Breton at auction could not at the time have been induced to give one-tenth of that amount for a Homer; and yet, for vigor, truth, sentiment, and technic--yes, technic, for this picture was superbly painted--"The Cotton Pickers," in my judgment, will outlive the other if the time should ever come when picture-buyers think for themselves.

The Englishman, on the other hand, is the hardest man to pull out of a groove. What _has been_ is good enough for him, whether in architecture, art, politics, or government. Any one who objects, or seeks to improve or to point out a new and different way, is "anathema." It is hardly more than twenty years ago that John Sargent, whose works are often the strongest drawing card in the annual exhibitions, was ignored by the jury of the Royal Academy.

"A slap-dash sort of a painter, my dear boy. Most dangerous to allow his things to come in. No drawing, you know, no finish--altogether out of the question." So spoke a Royal Academician when the question was broached.

Whistler never found a vacant spot, no matter how high, where he could hang even a 10 x 14.

"A mountebank in paint, my dear sir. Think of giving him a place alongside of Sir Frederick Leighton! Impossible! Absolutely impossible!" That the Luxembourg exhibited his portrait of his mother, and that the art critics of Europe voted it "one of the greatest portraits of modern times," made no difference. These Royal wiseacres knew better. Some of them still think they know better, a fact easily ascertained when you walk through the Exhibition, as I do every summer, and have continued to do for the past thirty years.

And this adherence to tradition is not confined entirely to technic--I refer now to many of the English painters of to-day--but appears in their choice of subjects as well. It is the _subjects_ which have been successful--that is, which have been _sold_--that must be painted over and over. Anything new is a departure, and a departure from the standard in the selection of a subject is as dangerous as a departure in the cut of a coat or the color of one's gloves--or was as dangerous until Sargent, Abbey, Frank Brangwyn, and men of that ilk smashed the current idols and taught men a new religion. A small congregation, it is true, but big enough for them to gather together to sing hymns of praise and pray for better things.

Let me ill.u.s.trate what I mean by conforming to the standard. Three years ago I was painting near a village, an hour from Paddington--a lovely spot on the River Thames. This quaint settlement is one of those little, waterside, old-fashioned-inn places, all drooping trees, punts, millions of roses, tumble-down cottages, stretches of meadows with the silver thread of the Thames glistening in the sunlight. There is also a bridge, a wonderful old brick bridge, stepping across on three arches, mould-incrusted, blackened by time, ma.s.ses of green rushes cl.u.s.tered about its feet--a most picturesque and lovable bridge, known to about everybody who has ever visited that section of England.

I had been there for a week, making my headquarters at the White Hart, when my attention was attracted to a man across the river--it is quite narrow here--a painter, evidently, who seemed to be surrounded by a collection of canvases. He went through the same motions every day, and then my curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see him.

Spread out on the gra.s.s lay eight canvases, all of one size, and each one containing a picture of the old brick bridge.

"But why eight all alike?" I asked in astonishment.

"Because I can't sell anything else. I am known as the Sonning Bridge painter. I've been at it for twenty years."

It is with this sort of thing, either in the selection of a subject, in its treatment, or in its handling, that I have but little sympathy, even though the great Ruskin, in speaking of this same English water-color school, the one I have catalogued for you, insists that it is the only "true school of landscape which has yet existed," an appreciation which is followed by the outburst that "from the last landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life we will pa.s.s at once to the first landscape of Turner." It is, of course, only one of Ruskin's dictatorial statements, admirable when written, because it was read and approved by a cla.s.s who knew no better and who accepted his words as other blind devotees obeyed the Delphic Oracle--statements, however, which are rejected by many of to-day who think for themselves and who think clearly, having the world's work spread open before them from which to judge.

Once in wandering around the Academia of Venice, taking in for the fiftieth time t.i.tian's masterpiece, I came across an Englishman who had paused in his walk and was adjusting his long-distance telescope--a monocle glued just under his left eyebrow. Mistaking my red-backed sketch-book for a Baedeker, he said, in an apologetic tone:

"Pardon me--I've left mine at home--but will you be good enough to tell me what Mr. Ruskin says about that picture?"

That I have personally refused to follow either Mr. Ruskin or the example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle--I am now referring entirely to their technic--is due to my having painted all my life out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective, and that the _staining of paper with washes of transparent color does not and cannot give them_.

Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping light--a glint of the sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky--ever be achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of paper--the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light.

Nor will a single dab of Chinese white produce the effect of it, should it be the _only_ dab of opaque white in the composition. The result in this case is still worse, for if transparent color has any value when uniformly distributed it is in the expression of air and perspective. The dab, then, is instantly out of plane, as it comes nearer to the eye than the transparent wash about it, and the illusion of distance is accordingly lost.

But another and quite a different thing occurs when the opaque color _forms part_ of the whole, the two systems blending each with the other. To ill.u.s.trate, my own experience has taught me that in nature whatever the sun shines _upon_ is opaque. The facade of a cathedral, for instance, facing a sky where the rays of the sun strike it full is opaque, while the angles of the architecture, casting shadows large and small into which sink the blue reflections of the sky or the reflected lights from near-by objects, are invariably transparent.

And now for my own system and the reasons why I have abandoned all other systems. And in giving them to you I want to repeat what I said in the beginning of this course, that I do not ask you students to follow in my footsteps if your predilections, training, and innate consciences lead you to a different view of treatment. Many of you may not like my work at all, and you certainly have a large following, especially among the younger men and women who have advanced ideas.

Many of you hold to the opinion that water-color men should stick to their trade and not encroach upon the oil painters in their technic.

And many of you may at heart prefer, nay, even delight in, the broad, loose washes of the early English school.

There may be a few of you, however, who have open minds free from prejudice and free from the traditions of the past, and who are dissatisfied with the want of "virility," if I may so express it, shown in pictures painted on white paper, and with successive washings, and may accordingly see something in my own methods which may encourage you to follow in the path which I have cleared and which I humbly trust will lead to infinitely better results than I have so far achieved.

And in this you must have the courage of your opinions and be prepared for criticisms. Those who are against me are more numerous than those who are for me and my methods.

Only last month a distinguished New York daily paper, in reviewing a recent exhibition, said: