any length subjects with which he deemed the layman had no proper
concern; partly also because in intimate conversation his innate and
powerful sense of humour so loved to assert itself that he wandered,
by preference, into fields where it found unfettered play. And so it
happened in the long and intimate talks in the studio, while he was
at his work, he loved to speak of things that belonged to the outer
world, and to let his wit play vividly, sometimes mischievously and
even maliciously, upon the qualities and foibles of his friends. Here
he was never reticent, and so relentless were his raillery and his
sarcasm that one was sometimes tempted to think that his acquaintances,
and even his friends, only existed for the purpose of displaying his
powers of attack and annihilation. I remember very well, when he was
decorating what afterwards became known as the “Peacock Room” in
Mr. Leyland’s house, that I used often to visit him at his work, and
sometimes shared with him the picnic meals which a devoted satellite
would prepare for him in the empty mansion. He was certainly very proud
of the elaborate scheme of blue and gold ornament he had devised, but I
believe this unalloyed admiration of his own achievement was scarcely
so great or so keen as his delighted anticipation of the owner’s shock
of surprise when he should return to discover that the handsome and
costly stamped leather, which originally adorned the walls of the
apartment, had been completely effaced to make room for the newly
fashioned pattern of decoration. He already scented the joy of the
battle that impended, and this added a peculiar zest to his labours in
the accomplishment of a purely artistic task. As he had hoped so indeed
it happened, and in the long controversy and conflict that ensued, he
found, I believe, the most perfect and unalloyed satisfaction.
His nature, in short, at every stage of his career was impishly
militant, and whereas other men are so constituted as to desire peace
at any price, there was with Whistler scarcely any cost he deemed too
great to secure a hostile encounter. To baulk him of a controversy was
to rob him of his peace of mind, and so deeply implanted in him was
the fighting spirit that he was sometimes only half-conscious of the
wounds he inflicted. Certain it is that, the lists once entered, he was
relentless in attack, and availed himself without scruple of any weapon
that came to his hand. And yet even in his most saturnine sallies there
was an underlying sense of humour that yielded to the onlooker at least
a part of the enjoyment that he himself drew from the encounter; while
his after recital of the tortuous ingenuity with which he had whipped
a harmless misunderstanding into a grave estrangement was always
irresistible in its appeal.
But though pitiless in combat, Whistler was not without a chivalrous
side to his nature. He was fond enough, to use his own expression,
of “collecting scalps,” but his tomahawk was never employed against
members of the gentler sex. His manner towards women was unfailingly
courteous and even deferential. In their company he laid aside the
weapons of war, exhibiting towards them on all occasions a delicacy
of sympathy and perception which they instinctively recognised and
appreciated. It set them at their ease. They felt they could listen
with interest and amusement to his recital of those fearless and
sometimes savage contests with the male, in complete security from any
danger of the war being carried into their own country. They were
conscious, in his presence, of an enduring truce between the sexes: a
truce so artfully established and so chivalrously conceded as to arouse
no suspicion that they were being treated with the indulgence due to
inferiors. There was, indeed, in his own character and personality
something of the charm, something also of the weakness, that is
commonly supposed to be exclusively feminine. The alertness of his
temperament betrayed an intuitive quickness in identifying himself
with the mood of the moment that found in them a ready response; and
his natural vanity, though it might sometimes seem overpowering to
members of his own sex, was so exercised as to leave no doubt that he
still held in reserve a full measure of the admiration which was due to
theirs.
Even as a craftsman there was something delicately feminine in
Whistler’s modes of work. I have often watched him at his own
printing-press when he was preparing a plate of one of his etchings,
and it was always fascinating to follow the deft and agile movements
of his hands as he inked the surface of the copper and then, with
successive touches, graduated the varying force of the impression to be
taken. Here, as I used to think, his method seemed more assured, his
alliance with the mechanical resources of his art more confident, than
when he was struggling with the subtler and more complex problems of
colour.
I have already spoken of those physical peculiarities with which he
had been liberally endowed by nature. They were such as to make him a
marked figure in any company in which he appeared, and, so far from
being a source of embarrassment to himself, he regarded them as a
substantial asset to be carefully cultivated and artfully obtruded
upon public notice. He even went so far as to enforce and emphasise
what there was of inherited eccentricity in his personal appearance.
The single tuft of white hair which lay embedded in the coiling black
locks adorning his brow, he regarded with a special complacency and
pride; and I was amused one evening in Cheyne Walk, while I watched him
dressing for dinner, to observe the infinite pains he bestowed upon
this particular item of his toilet. It was already past the hour when
we should both have been seated at our friend’s table, but this fact in
no way abbreviated the care with which he cultivated and arranged this
unique feature in his appearance.
And yet it would be wrong, perhaps, to ascribe the delay only to
vanity, because to be late for dinner was with Whistler almost a
religion. Certain it was, however, that he took a childish delight in
any little studied departures from the rules of ordinary costume.
At one time he ostentatiously abandoned the white neck-tie which was
the accepted accompaniment of evening dress; at another, a delicate
wand-like cane was deemed to be a necessary ornament to be carried in
his walks abroad; and yet again he would announce an approved change in
fashion by appearing in a pair of spotless white ducks beneath his long
black frock-coat. These calculated eccentricities induced in the minds
of the crowd the conviction that Whistler deliberately sought a cheap
notoriety, and it must be conceded, even by those who recognised the
serious side of his nature, that he exhibited at times a strange blend
of the man of genius and the showman. And yet this admission might
easily be made to convey a false impression. He was in a sense both
the one and the other, but their separate functions were never merged
or confused. Till his task as an artist was completed no man was more
serious in his purpose or more exacting or fastidious in the demands
he made upon himself. There was nothing of the charlatan in that part
of him which he dedicated to his work; and it was not until the artist
was satisfied that he availed himself of such antics as attracted,
and perhaps were designed to attract, the astonished attention of the
public.
One charge that was often urged against him by his enemies, arose out
of the singular choice of titles for his pictures. But it was not,
I think, in any spirit of affectation that he elected to describe
some of his works in terms only strictly appropriate to music. His
“Harmonies” and his “Nocturnes,” though they seemed at the time to
indicate a certain wilful perversity, had in reality a true relation to
principles in Art which he was earnestly seeking to establish. It has
been rightly held of music that, in its detachment from the things of
the intellect and its independence of defined human emotion, it stands
as a model to all other modes of expression by its jealous guardianship
of those indefinable qualities which are of the essence of Art itself.
And in a sense it may be said of Whistler that he discharged a like
function in the realm of painting. For all appeal made through other
means than those strictly belonging to the chosen medium he had neither
sympathy nor pity. It was for the incommunicable element in painting,
incommunicable save through the unassisted resources of painting
itself, that he was constantly striving, and it was his revolt against
all alien pretensions that led him to seek and to adopt the analogy of
music wherein the saving efficacy of such elements is never questioned.
THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION[1]
The British Section of the International Fine Arts Exhibition, to the
study of which these pages are designed to serve as introduction, may
claim to possess one or two features of exceptional interest. It is
the first time that in any exhibition held outside the British Isles a
serious endeavour has been made to illustrate the progressive movement
of the English school of painting. The works of English painters have
time and again been shown in the different capitals of Europe, and it
is no longer possible to allege that the masters whose achievements we
prize are unknown beyond the limits of our own shores. But the present
occasion is the first wherein a serious and successful experiment has
been made to render the chosen examples of the art of the past truly
representative of the birth and growth of modern art in England and of
the distinctive developments of style which have marked its history.
And it is peculiarly fitting that this connected panorama of English
art should be offered in the capital of a kingdom to whose example the
art of every land has at some time owned its indebtedness. If it be
true that every road leads to Rome, it is no less true that, since the
dawn of the Renaissance, the footsteps of the artists of all northern
lands have worn the several ways that make for Italy; and it will be
seen, as we come to trace the story of painting in England, that,
not only in its earlier appeal but again and again in the successive
revolutions of style and method that have marked its progress, it has
found renewed encouragement and fresh inspiration in the splendid
and varied achievements of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to
Michael Angelo, from Bellini to Tintoretto.
The history of painting in England precedes by more than a century
the history of English painting. The force of the Reformation had
unquestionably the effect of suddenly snapping the artistic tradition.
At an earlier time England could boast of a race of artists who, as the
illuminated manuscripts of the period clearly show, were able to hold
their own with the most perfect masters in that kind that Europe could
show; but with the advent of the Reformation the imaginative impulse of
our people found a different channel. The strength of our Renaissance
sought expression in our literature, and for a considerable period we
became and remained indebted for all expression of pictorial design
to a race of foreign artists who enjoyed the hospitality of our land.
Even before the Reformation was complete Holbein had found a home at
the English Court, and at a later period Rubens and his great pupil
Van Dyck were invited to our shores. They brought with them to England
the great tradition in portraiture that may be traced back to Italy--a
tradition having its spring in the style and practice of the masters of
Venice, whose devotion to Nature survived as an inheritance to Northern
Europe when the more imaginative design of the school of Florence had
fallen into decay.
It may be said of all modern art in whatever land we follow its
story, that its master currents flow in the direction of portrait and
landscape, and it was in these twin streams that the English school,
when a century later it came into being, was destined to prove its
acknowledged supremacy. But the realistic spirit which from the first
had stamped itself upon the great Venetians, even at a period when they
seemed to be labouring wholly or mainly in the service of religion,
had gathered in its passage towards our shores yet another impulse,
which found its first expression in the art of the Low Countries.
Of the painting of _genre_--that art which dwells lovingly upon the
illustration of the social manners of the time--there is already a hint
even in Venice itself; but it was in Holland that it first claimed
a separate and secure existence; and it was to the examples in this
kind, perfected by the Dutch masters, that we owe the achievement of
the great painter who may be claimed as the founder of the modern
English school. That school may be said, indeed, to date from the
birth of William Hogarth. English painters--not a few--had practised
before his time, but their work only followed, without rivalling,
that of foreign contemporaries under whose influence they laboured.
Hogarth was the first who by the independence of his genius gave the
seal and stamp of national character to the pictorial illustration of
the manners of his age. It was the fashion at one time to dwell almost
exclusively upon Hogarth’s qualities as a satirist, to the neglect of
those more enduring claims which are now conceded to him as a great
master of the art he professed; but the criticism of a later time has
repaired that injustice, and Hogarth takes his place now not merely in
virtue of the social message he sought to convey, but even more by
reason of his great qualities as a colourist and a master of tone. Not
that we need underrate or ignore those dramatic elements by which he
still makes so strong an appeal to our admiration. It is rare enough,
even among the supreme painters of _genre_, to find so faithful, so
penetrating an insight into character. Of all the great Dutchmen whom
he succeeded Jan Steen alone can, in this particular, claim to be his
rival; and although the English school is specially rich in the class
of composition which his genius and invention had initiated, there are
none of all those who have practised in a later day who would not still
own him as their master.
The two examples secured for the present exhibition show Hogarth at
his best, both as a painter and as an inventor. “The Lady’s Last
Stake”--contributed by Mr. Pierpont Morgan--even when our admiration
has been glutted by the rich evidence it affords of Hogarth’s
unrivalled control of a kind of truth that might have found expression
in an art other than the art of the painter, still draws from us the
unstinted homage due to a great colourist whose chosen tints are
submitted with unfailing skill to every delicate and subtle gradation
of tone; while in “The Card Party,” lent by Sir Frederick Cook, where
these qualities are not less clearly announced, we are left at leisure
to follow and appreciate the unflagging observation which registers
every detail that serves for the dramatic presentation of the chosen
theme.
From the time of Hogarth to our own day this particular style, which he
may claim to have originated, has never lacked professors. As it passed
into the hands of Wilkie satire is softened by sympathy, the foibles
of character are touched with a gentler and more tender spirit, and
the adroitly ordered groups, with which he sometimes loves to crowd
his canvas, tell, in their final impression, of the presence of a kind
of sentiment, sometimes perhaps even of a measure of sentimentalism,
which scarcely came within the range of Hogarth’s fiercer survey of
life. And, again, in the later work of Orchardson sentiment and satire
have both yielded to another ambition that was content to render with
unfailing sympathy and distinction of style the finer graces of social
life. In the superb picture of “The Young Duke” we may note how clearly
the gifts of the painter dominate the scene, his eye ever on the alert
for the opportunities of rich and delicate harmonies supplied by every
chosen accessory of costume and furniture; and no less eager to exhibit
and to record by means of the subtle resources of his art those finer
shades of social breeding that the subject suggests. In this power of
granting a nameless dignity to the art of _genre_--a dignity resident
in the painter which by some strange magic he contrives to confer
upon the people of his creation--Sir William Orchardson sometimes
recalls the art of Watteau, who indeed remains unrivalled in his power
to perceive and his ability to register those slighter realities of
gesture and bearing which give to the rendering of trivial things a
distinction which only style can bestow.
It is interesting to turn from this characteristic example of Sir
William Orchardson’s style to the work of an elder contemporary in
the person of Frith. The two artists--though both may be said to be
engaged in the same task--make a widely contrasted appeal. With the
former, whatever other message he may intend to convey, the claims
of the painter stand foremost. We are conscious of the controlling
influence of the colourist and the master of pictorial composition
before we are permitted to study or to enjoy the human realities that
he has chosen to depict. With Frith, on the other hand, it is the
human element in the design that first arrests our attention. Gifts of
a purely artistic kind he undoubtedly possessed, as the example here
exhibited sufficiently proves--gifts which at one time criticism tended
to ignore or to undervalue; but it remains finally true nevertheless
that it is as a student of manners, presented in a form sometimes
recalling the arts of the theatre, that Frith makes his first appeal to
our attention. In this respect he claims kinship with Hogarth himself,
whose influence, I doubt not, he would have been proud to acknowledge.
“Coming of Age in the Olden Time,” necessitating, by the choice of
its subject, the employment of historic costume, illustrates only one
aspect of Frith’s varied talent, and he will perhaps be best remembered
by such works as “The Railway Station” and “Ramsgate Sands,” where
he is called upon to render with unflinching fidelity those facts
of contemporary dress in which painters differently gifted find no
picturesque opportunity; and whatever may be Time’s final judgment upon
Frith’s claim in the region of pure art, it cannot be questioned that
such richly peopled canvases must for ever remain an invaluable record
of the outward realities of the generation for which he labored.
The historic side of _genre_ painting is further illustrated in the
present collection in the person of Maclise, who, like his great
forerunner, William Hogarth, was attracted again and again by the
art of the theatre. But Maclise brought to his task certain larger
qualities of design and composition which he had won from the study of
the great masters of style; and although he never achieved the highest
triumphs in the region of the ideal his efforts in that direction
left an impress upon his painting that served to distinguish it from
the achievements of those who laboured in obedience to a more modest
tradition.
The English theatre has attracted the talent of a long line of artists,
some of whom, like Clint, are little known in any other sphere. Perhaps
the greatest of them all (if we except the name of Hogarth himself) was
Johann Zoffany, whose paintings, admirable in the rendering of incident
and character, are even more remarkable for his great qualities as
a colourist and his perfect mastery over the secrets of tone. As a
student of the theatre he may perhaps be seen to best advantage in the
several fine examples in the possession of the Garrick Club; but Lord
O’Hagan’s picture of Charles Townley the collector, presented in his
library with his marbles, asserts with convincing force his right to
rank among the great painters of his time.
Among other pictures in this category whose high claims deserve a
fulness of consideration which the exigencies of space alone forbid me
to grant, I may mention the Eastern study by Lewis, the “Dawn” by E. J.
Gregory, and the group of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle by John Pettie.
I have hinted already that in the brief story of our national school of
painting we are constantly reminded of the abiding splendours of the
art of Italy, and even in the work of men whose genuine victories were
won in another sphere there are constant echoes of the larger language
moulded by the great masters of the south. For although, at the first,
it is only in the allied departments of portrait and landscape that
the art of England claims and owns unquestioned supremacy, yet in the
career of the gifted painter who may be said to have first firmly
established our claim to rank among the schools of Europe we are not
allowed to forget the glorious victories of the Italian Renaissance.
It has been sometimes alleged of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s occasional
experiments in the grand style that their failure to rival the masters
he most admired proves how futile were his studies in that branch
of art in which he could never hope to excel. But this, I think,
is to take only a shallow and superficial view of the factors that
make for excellence in any chosen field of artistic endeavour; for
if Sir Joshua’s essays in ideal design now fade into insignificance
by comparison with the solid and enduring work he achieved in
portraiture, it remains none the less true that the study of those
great models towards which his ambition led him has served to grant
to his interpretation of individual face and form a measure of added
dignity and power that could have been won from no other source. His
sketch-book--preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum--while
it forms an interesting record of his sojourn in Italy is no less
instructive as illustrating his untiring devotion to those great
masters who laboured in a realm of art that his own genius was never
destined to inhabit; and there is something infinitely touching in the
concluding sentences of his valedictory address to the students of the
Royal Academy wherein, while frankly confessing his own failure, he
reiterates his undiminished admiration of the greatest of the great
Florentines. “It will not,” he says, “I hope, be thought presumptuous
in me to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators, but of his
admirers. I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities
and to the tastes of the time in which I live. Yet, however unequal
I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again I
would tread in the steps of that great master. To kiss the hem of his
garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and
distinction enough for an ambitious man. I feel a self-congratulation
in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite.
I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony
of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I desire that the last
words I should pronounce in this academy and from this place might be
the name of Michael Angelo.”
In the same year in which these words were uttered there is yet another
reference to his earlier ambitions which is scarcely less pathetic.
Writing to Sheridan, who desired to purchase the beautiful picture of
St. Cecilia, for which Mrs. Sheridan had served as the model, he says:
“It is with great regret that I part with the best picture I ever
painted; for though I have every year hoped to paint better and better,
and may truly say ‘Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum,’
it has not been always the case. However, there is now an end of the
pursuit; the race is over, whether it is won or lost.”
The judgment of Time has left the land that owned him in no doubt
that the race had been worthily won. The prize awarded to him by the
acclaim of subsequent generations was not perhaps the prize he coveted
the most; and yet if the goal towards which he set his feet was never
reached, the time spent in the study of the great masters of the past
affords no story of wasted ambition. For without the example of those
great masters he loved to study, his own achievement would have been
shorn of certain elements of greatness which have served to place him
foremost in the ranks of the portrait painters of his time.