Six Centuries of Painting Part 22

CROSSING THE BROOK

_National Gallery of British Art, London_]

a natural arrangement of the colour and breadth of the chiaroscuro."

Whether or not we agree with all of Burnet's opinions, we shall be more likely to learn the truth about Turner from prosaic contemporaries of his earlier years than from all the rhapsodies of later days. How significant, when stripped of its amusing circ.u.mstances, is the simple fact related thus by Leslie:--"In 1839, when Constable exhibited his _Opening of Waterloo Bridge_, it was placed in one of the small rooms next to a sea-piece by Turner--a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's picture seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the _Waterloo Bridge_ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of this red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just after Turner had left it. "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired a gun." On the opposite wall was a picture by Jones of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego in the Furnace. "A coal," said Cooper, "has bounced across the room from Jones's picture and set fire to Turner's sea." Turner did not come in again for a day and a half, and then in the last moment allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy."

It was in 1835, after an unbroken popular triumph lasting over thirty years, that the critics openly rounded on him. The occasion seized by _Blackwood's Magazine_ was the exhibition of his first Venetian picture exhibited in that year--it is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. "What is Venice in this picture?" wrote Blackwood's critic. "A flimsy, whitewashed, meagre a.s.semblage of architecture, starting off ghost-like into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the picture). The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the boats with their red worsted masts are as gewgaw as a child's toy which he may have cracked to see what it is made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its character."

Ruskin was then only sixteen years old, but eight years later appeared in print the first volume of "Modern Painters," "by an undergraduate of Oxford," as the result of his growing indignation at this and subsequent attacks on Turner. Without following Ruskin into the dubious regions whither the pursuit of his romantic fancies ultimately led him, we may in fairness quote the opening sentence of his second chapter, "Of Truth of Colour," which will help us, moreover, in understanding the conditions under which painting was being conducted at this period.

"There is nothing so high in art," he says, "but that a scurrile jest can reach at, and often the greater the work the easier it is to turn it into ridicule. To appreciate the science of Turner's colour would require the study of a life; but to laugh at it requires little more than the knowledge that the yolk of egg is yellow and spinage green; a fund of critical information on which the remarks of most of our leading periodicals have been of late years exclusively based. We shall, however, in spite of the sulphur and treacle criticisms of our Scotch connoisseurs, and the eggs and spinage of our English ones, endeavour to test the works of this great colourist by a knowledge of nature somewhat more extensive than is to be gained by an acquaintance, however formed, with the apothecary's shop or the dinner table."

So much for the critics. For the artist, if Ruskin said more than Turner himself could understand, he has summed up his achievement in a few pa.s.sages which may possibly outlast the works themselves. "There has been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not, like some few artists, been without childhood; his course of study has been as evidently as it has been swiftly progressive; and in different stages of the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another, has been aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his career he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. As he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never abandoned without a gain: and his present works present the sum and perfection of his acc.u.mulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience and pa.s.sion of one who feels too much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause for expression or ponder over his syllables." And again of his latest works--"There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy; the instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered more; which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand and the vainness of the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which G.o.d has revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of his life: he knows her now too well, he cannot falter over the material littlenesses of her outward form: he must give her soul, or he has done nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the earth, and the oil. 'I cannot gather the beams out of the east, or I would make _them_ tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read this, interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the pa.s.sion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me; for I will give you no patient mockery, no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am and whom I serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me; but remember that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery.'"

Within a very few years Ruskin was performing a more useful service for the English School of painting than that of gilding the fine gold of its greatest genius. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, young Holman Hunt had borrowed a copy of "Modern Painters," which, he says, entirely changed his opinions as to the views held by society at large concerning art, and in 1849 there were exhibited Hunt's _Rienzi_, Rossetti's _Girlhood of Mary Virgin_, and Millais' _Lorenzo and Isabella_, each inscribed with the mystic letters "P.R.B.," meaning "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." It is interesting to note that this alliance was formed when the three young artists were looking over a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

In the following year Hunt exhibited the _British Family_, Millais, _The Carpenter's Shop_, and Rossetti the _Ecce Ancilla Domini_, and in 1851 were Hunt's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and three by Millais. The fury of the critics had now reached a point at which some notice had to be taken of it--as of a man in an apopleptic fit. That of the Times in particular:--"These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style, false perspective, and crude colour of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery "snapped instead of folded," faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and expression forced into caricature. That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity deserves no quarter at the hands of the public." It was in disapproval of the tone of this outburst that the author of "Modern Painters"

addressed his famous and useful letter to the _Times_, vindicating the artists, and following it up with another in which he wishes them all "heartily good speed, believing in sincerity that if they temper the courage and energy which they have shown in the adoption of their systems with patience and discretion in framing it, and if they do not suffer themselves to be driven by harsh and careless criticism into rejection of the ordinary means of obtaining influence over the minds of others, they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the foundation of a school of art n.o.bler than the world has seen for three hundred years."

If any one of this strenuous young band had been a painter of the first rank, this prediction might have been abundantly verified. But it must be owned that none of them was. Holman Hunt came nearest to being, and Millais probably thought he was, when he had abandoned his early principles and shaped for the Presidency of the Academy. Rossetti had more genius in him than the others, but it came out in poetry as well as in painting, and perhaps in more lasting form. As it was, the effects of the revolution were widespread and entirely beneficial; but those effects must not be looked for in the works of any one particular artist, but rather in the general aspect of English art in the succeeding half century, and perhaps to-day. It broke up the soil. The flowers that came up were neither rare nor great, but they were many, varied, and pleasing, and in every respect an improvement on the evergreens and hardy annuals with which the English garden had become more and more enc.u.mbered from want of intelligent cultivation. More than this, the freedom engendered of revolt had now encouraged the young artist to feel that he was no longer bound to paint in any particular fashion. People's eyes were opened to possibilities as well as to actualities; and though they were p.r.o.ne to close again under the soporific influence of what was regular and conventional, they were capable of opening again, perhaps with a start, but without the necessity for a surgical operation. In 1847, for example, George Frederick Watts had offered to adorn, free of charge, the booking-hall of Euston Station, and had been refused--Watts, by the by, was quite independent of the Pre-Raphaelites--whereas in 1860 the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn accepted his _School of Legislature_, and in 1867 he was elected an academician.

Two somewhat remarkable effects of the movement are attributed to it by Mr Edmund Gosse (in a note on the work of Alfred Hunt, written in 1884), which are probably typical of many more. The Liverpool Academy, founded in 1810, had an annual grant of 200 from the Corporation. In 1857 it gave a prize to Millais' _Blind Girl_ in preference to the most popular picture of the year (Abraham Solomon's _Waiting for the Verdict_), and so great was the public indignation that pressure was brought to bear on the Corporation, the grant was withdrawn, and the Academy ruined.

In the other instance we may not go the whole way with Mr Gosse, when in speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite principle he says that "the school of Turnerian landscape was fatally affected by them," or that all the landscape painters, except Alfred Hunt, "accepted the veto which the Pre-Raphaelites had tacitly laid upon composition or a striving after an artificial harmony of forms in landscape." But to a certain extent their influence undoubtedly was prejudicial in that respect. In suggesting another reason for the cessation of Turner s influence he is quite as near the mark, namely, the action of the Royal Academy in admitting no landscape painters to membership. At Turner's death in 1851 there were only three, among whom was Creswick. "This popular artist," says Mr Gosse, "was the Upas tree under whose shadow the Academical patronage of landscape died in England. From his election as an a.s.sociate in 1842 to that of Vicat Cole in 1869, no landscape painter entered the doors of the Royal Academy." Of this august body we shall have something to say later on.

IV

MANET AND WHISTLER AGAINST THE WORLD

Let us now cross the channel again, and see what is going on there, in 1863. Evidently there is something on, or there would not be so much excitement. As we approach the Capital we are aware of one name being prominent in the general uproar--that of eDOUARD MANET.

Manet's revolt against tradition began before he became an artist, as was in fact necessary, or he would never have been allowed to become one. The traditions of the Bourgoisie were sacred, and their power and importance since the revolution of 1848 not to be lightly set aside. But young Manet was so determined that he was at last allowed by his bourgeois parents to have his way, and was sent to study under that very rough diamond Couture. Now again his "revolting" qualities showed themselves, this time in the life cla.s.s. Theodore Duret, his friend and biographer, puts it so amusingly that a quotation, untranslated, is imperative:--"Cette repulsion qui se developpe chez Manet pour l'art de la tradition," he says, "se manifeste surtout par le mepris qu'il temoigne aux modeles posant dans l'atelier et a l'etude du nu telle qu'elle etait alors conduite. Le culte de l'antique comme on le comprenait dans la premiere moitie du XIXe siecle parmi les peintres avait amene la recherche de modeles speciaux. On leur demandait des formes pleines. Les hommes en particulier devaient avoir une poitrine large et bombee, un torse puissant, des membres muscles. Les individus doues des qualites requises qui posaient alors dans les ateliers, s'etaient habitues a prendre des att.i.tudes pretendues expressive et heroques, mais toujours tendues et conventionelles, d'ou l'imprevu etait banni. Manet, porte vers le naturel et epris de recherches, s'irritait de ces poses d'un type fixe et toujours les memes. Aussi faisait-il tres mauvais menage avec les modeles. Il cherchait a en obtenir des poses contraires a leurs habitudes, auxquelles ils se refusaient. Les modeles connus qui avaient vu les morceaux faits d'apres leurs torses conduire certains eleves a l'ecole de Rome, alors la supreme recompense, et qui dans leur orgueil s'attribuaient presqu'une part du succes, se revoltaient de voir un tout jeune homme ne leur temoigner aucun respect. Il parait que fatigue de l'eternelle etude du nu, Manet aurait essaye de draper et meme d'habiller les modeles, ce qui aurait cause parmi eux une veritable indignation."

It was in 1863 that the storm of popular fury burst over Manet's head, on the exhibition of his first important picture, painted three years before, generally known as _Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe_. This wonderful canvas was something so new and so surprising that it was rejected by the jury of the Salon. But in company with less conspicuous though equally unacceptable pieces by such men as Bracquemond, Cazin, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J. P. Laurens, Le Gros, p.i.s.sarro, Vollon, and Whistler, it was accorded an exhibition, alongside the official Salon, which was called _le Salon des refuses_. Being the largest and most conspicuous work shown, it attracted no less attention than if it had been officially hung, and probably much more. "Ainsi ce Dejeuner sur l'herbe," says M. Duret, "venait-il faire comme une enorme tache. Il donnait la sensation de quelquechose outre. Il heurtait la vision. Il produisait, sur les yeux du public de ce temps, l'effet de la pleine lumiere sur les yeux du hibou."

There was more than one reason for this remarkable picture surprising and shocking the sensibilities of the public. It represents a couple of men in everyday bourgeois costume, one sitting and the other reclining on the gra.s.s under trees, while next to one of them is seated a young woman, her head turned to the spectator, in no costume at all. A profusion of _articles de dejeuner_ is beside her, and it is evident that they are only waiting to arrange the meal till a second young woman, who is seen bathing in the near background, is ready to join them. The subject and composition are reminiscent of Giorgione's beautiful and famous _Fete Champetre_, in the Louvre, and Manet quite frankly and in quite good faith pleaded Giorgione as his precedent when a.s.sailed on grounds of good taste. But unfortunately he had not put his male figures in "fancy dress," and the public could hardly be expected to realise that Giorgione had not, either. As for the painting, it was a revelation. He had broken every canon of tradition--and yet it was a marvellous success!

Another outburst greeted the appearance of the wonderful _Olympia_ in 1865, this time in the official catalogue. This is now enshrined in the Louvre. It was painted in 1863, but fortunately, perhaps, Manet had not the courage to exhibit it then--for who can tell to what length the fury of the Philistines might not have been goaded by two such shocks? As it was, this second violation of the sacred traditions of the nude, which had been exclusively reserved for allegorical subjects, was considered an outrage; and the innocent, natural model, of by no means voluptuous appearance, was regarded as a disgraceful intrusion into the chaste category of nymphs and G.o.ddesses. As a painter, however, Manet had shown himself unmistakably as the great figure of

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XLVIII.--eDOUARD MANET

OLYMPIA

_Louvre, Paris_]

the age, and if we have to go to Paris or to New York to catch a glimpse of any of his work, it is partly because we are too backward in seizing opportunities so eagerly snapped up by others.

The next great storm in the artistic world followed in the wake of one of Manet's companions in adversity at the _Salon des Refuses_--JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER, who left Paris and settled with his mother in Chelsea in the late 'sixties. That he should have existed for fifteen whole years without breaking forth into strife is so extraordinary that we are almost tempted to attribute it to the influence of his mother, who used to bring him to the old church on Sundays, as the present writer dimly remembers. In this case it was not the public, but the critic, John Ruskin, who so deftly dropped the fat into the fire. Having, as we saw, taken up the cudgels for poor Turner against the public in 1843, and for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1850, he now, in 1877, ranged himself on the other side, and accused Whistler of impertinence in "flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public." The action for libel which Whistler commenced in the following year resulted in strict fact in a verdict of one farthing damages for the libelled one; but in reality the results were much farther reaching. The artist had vindicated not only himself, but his art, from the attacks of the ignorant and b.u.mptious.

"Poor art!" Whistler wrote, "What a sad state the s.l.u.t is in, an these gentlemen shall help her. The artist alone, by the way, is to no purpose and remains unconsulted; his work is explained and rectified without him, by the one who was never in it--but upon whom G.o.d, always good though sometimes careless, has thrown away the knowledge refused to the author, poor devil!" This recalls Turner's comment on Ruskin's eulogies--which Whistler had probably never heard of--and making every allowance for Whistler's fiery, combative nature, and sharp pen, there is much truth, and truth that needed telling, in his contention. "Art,"

he continues, "that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and wait for wisdom from the pa.s.ser-by? For guidance from the hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? Out upon the shallow conceit!"

Of the hopeless ba.n.a.lity of the critics during this period there are plenty of examples to be found without looking very far. Several of the most amusing have been embodied in a little volume of "Whistler Stories," lately compiled by Mr Don C. Seitz of New York. Here we find _The Standard's_ little joke about Whistler paying his costs in the action--apart from those allowed on taxation, that is to say--"But he has only to paint, or, as we believe he expresses it 'knock off' three or four 'symphonies' or 'harmonies'--or perhaps he might try his hand at a Set of Quadrilles in Peac.o.c.k Blue?--and a week's labour will set all square." Then there is this priceless revelation of his art when questioning his cla.s.s in Paris. "Do you know what I mean when I say tone, value, light, shade, quality, movement, construction, etc.?"

_Chorus_, "Oh, yes, Mr Whistler!" "I'm glad, for it's more than I do myself." More serious was the verdict of Sir George Scharf, keeper of the National Gallery, when (in 1874) there was a proposal to purchase the portrait of Carlyle. "Well," he said, icily, on looking at the picture, "and has painting come to this!"

High place, it would seem, did not always conduce to an appreciation of high art. Here is the opinion of Sir Charles Eastlake, F.R.I.B.A., also keeper of the

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XLIX.--J. M. WHISTLER

LILLIE IN OUR ALLEY

_In the possession of John J. Cowan, Esq._]

National Gallery, published in 1883, on one of Rembrandt's pictures in the Louvre:--

"_The Bath_, a very ugly and offensive picture, in which the princ.i.p.al object is the ill-proportioned figure of a naked woman, distinguished by flesh tones whose colour suggests the need of a bath rather than the fact that it has been taken. The position of the old servant wiping the woman's feet is not very intelligible, and the drawing of the bather's legs is distinctly defective. The light and shade of the picture, though obviously untrue to natural effect, are managed with the painter's usual dexterity."

V

THE ROYAL ACADEMY

The last revolt of the nineteenth century was effected in a peaceable and business-like, but none the less successful manner, by the establishment, in 1886, of the New English Art Club as a means of defence against the mighty _vis inertiae_ of the Royal Academy. As an example of the disadvantage under which any artist laboured who did not bow down to the great Idol, I venture to quote a few sentences from the report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the administration of the Chantrey Trust, in 1904:----

"With five exceptions, all the works in the collection have been bought from summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy."

"It is admitted by those most friendly to the present system that the Chantrey collection regarded as a national gallery of modern British art is incomplete, and in a large degree unrepresentative. The works of many of the most brilliant and capable artists who worked in the last quarter of the nineteenth century are missing from the gallery, and the endeavour to account for these omissions has formed one main branch of the inquiry."

"It has been stated that while containing some fine works of art, it is lacking in variety and interest, and while failing to give expression to much of the finest artistic feeling of its period, it includes not a few works of minor importance. Full consideration of the evidence has led the Committee to regard this view as approximately correct."

Up to 1897, when the collection was handed over to the nation, little short of 50,000 had been spent upon it. And with five exceptions, amounting to less than 5000, the whole of that money had been expended on such works alone as were permitted by the Academy to be exhibited on their walls.

Of the 5000, it may be noted, 2200 was well laid out on Watts's _Psyche_; but with regard to the very first purchase made, in 1877, for 1000,--Hilton's _Christ Mocked_, which had been painted as an altar-piece for S. Peter's, Eaton Square, in 1839, the following question and answer are full of bitter significance for the poor artist of the time:----

Lord Ribblesdale.--Was Mr Hilton's picture offered by the Vicar and Churchwardens?

The Secretary to the Royal Academy.--Yes, it was offered by them--one of the Churchwardens was the late Lord Maghermorne--he was then Sir James M'Garrell Hogg--he was a great friend of Sir Francis Grant who was the President, and he offered it to him for the Chantrey Collection.

When repeatedly pressed by the Committee for the reasons why so few purchases were made outside the Academy exhibitions, the President, Sir Edward Poynter, repeatedly pleaded the impossibility of a Council of Ten, all of whom must see pictures before they are bought, travelling about in search of them. In view of this apparent--but obviously unreal--difficulty, the following questions were then put by the Earl of Lytton:----

420. Without actually changing the terms of the will, has the question of employing an agent for the purpose of finding out what pictures were available and giving advice upon them ever been suggested?--No.

421. That would come within the term of the will, would it not, the final voting being, as it is now, in the hands of the Academy; it would be open to the Council to appoint an agent, as was suggested just now, of going to Scotland, and going about the country making suggestions as to pictures which in his opinion might be bought?--The question has never arisen.