BRITISH IMPRESSIONISTS
In spite of the efforts of the Arts and Crafts movement the average
man was still unmoved from his conviction that art was an affair of
pictures. He even went so far as to believe that the new art movement
was only accidentally derived from pictorial art and would eventually
end where it began--in something to hang on a wall. He was supported
in this belief by the usual predominance given to picture talk in
the discussions of the contending art factions. The Nineties were
very fruitful of such discussions, inheriting as they did the still
unsettled principles and contentions which survived from the artistic
battles of the Eighties. These battles were never more than the
British echo of French Impressionism, but they were complicated by the
so-called naturalism of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The latter was
largely the affair of the preceding thirty years, and with the dawn of
the Nineties Pre-Raphaelitism had become an accepted art convention for
those desirous of accepting it, and a subject of indifference for the
rest.
Whistler, allied with but apart from the Impressionists, had fought the
fight of the open-air school to as conclusive an end as such contests
ever reach. And Ruskin’s ideas had been almost entirely diverted into
their more defensible channels of craftsmanship. George Moore had been
for several years holding aloft the banner of French Impressionism
with conspicuous success, in _The Speaker_ and elsewhere, and William
Ernest Henley had fought in _The Scots Observer_ an equally vigorous
and equally successful battle on behalf of the same ideals, laying
stress upon a realism more definitely associated with romance. But in
the midst of all this talk about paint and technique and new methods of
approaching Nature, there was a very real undercurrent of philosophic
thought which was not afraid of associating pictorial art with social
life and action. The old sanity of applied art constantly reasserted
itself in the newer movements. Whistler also, when occasion offered,
did not scorn applied art, as we know from his enthusiasm over the
decoration of the Peacock Room at Sir James Leyland’s house, and of his
own house in Chelsea. Frank Brangwyn was as much inclined towards mural
painting as George Frederick Watts, whilst William Nicholson, James
Pryde, Dudley Hardy and Aubrey Beardsley devoted time and talent to the
creation of a national school of poster decorators. And the revival of
the decorated book gave black and white art a new sphere of expression.
Even so uncompromising an advocate of the framed picture as George
Moore was not averse from discussing the value of pictures in
relation to national life. Speaking of the practical utility of the
Impressionist pictures he said: “They would inspire not only a desire
to possess beautiful things, but I can imagine young men and women
deriving an extraordinary desire of freedom from the landscapes
of Monet and Sisley: Manet, too. Manet, perhaps, more than anyone
liberates the mind from conventions, from prejudices. He creates a
spirit of revolt against the old; he inculcates a desire of adventure.
Adam standing in Eden looking at the sun rise was no more naked and
unashamed than Manet. I believe that a gallery of Impressionist
pictures would be more likely than any other pictures to send a man
to France, and that is a great point. Everyone must go to France.
France is the source of all the arts. Let the truth be told. We go
there, every one of us, like rag-pickers, with baskets on our backs,
to pick up the things that come in our way, and out of unconsidered
trifles fortunes have often been made. We learn in France to appreciate
not only art--we learn to appreciate life, to look upon life as an
incomparable gift. In some café, in some Nouvelle Athènes, named though
it be not in any Baedeker nor marked on any traveller’s chart, the
young man’s soul will be exalted to praise life. Art is but praise
of life, and it is only through art that we can praise life.” Such an
attitude is inseparable from the modern art movement, and it survives
to-day in the development of the decorative arts among the Post
Impressionists.
[Illustration: THE PEACOCK FAN
_By Charles Conder_
_In the possession of Mr. Grant Richards_]
Conventional pictorial art in this country at the time of the modern
revolt had long suffered from hopeless privacy and class distinction.
Richard Muther says: “English painting is exclusively an art based
on luxury, optimism and aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness
and good-breeding it is exclusively designed to ingratiate itself
with English ideas of comfort. Yet the pictures have to satisfy very
different tastes--the taste of a wealthy middle class which wishes to
have substantial nourishment, and the æsthetic taste of an _élite_
class, which will only tolerate the quintessence of art, the most
subtle art that can be given. But all these works are not created for
galleries, but for the drawing-room of a private house, and in subject
and treatment they have all to reckon with the ascendant view that
a picture ought, in the first place, to be an attractive article of
furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the lover of antiquity,
is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the sportsman, the lover
of country life, has a delight in little rustic scenes, and the women
are enchanted with feminine types. And everything must be kept within
the bounds of what is charming, temperate and prosperous, without in
any degree suggesting the struggle for existence. The pictures have
themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from the midst of which
they are beheld.” Into some such condition of pictorial art the new
men threw themselves, opening windows, as it were, and allowing the
outside world, with all its rudeness and all its unseen and unrealised
beauties, to enter.
The organised revolt took the form of protest by the New English Art
Club against the Royal Academy, and of the Glasgow School against
the conventions of the Royal Scottish Academy, and as art movements
generally begin elsewhere and end here, the battles they were fighting
represented practically the end of the fight for Impressionism. The
artistic public was gradually becoming used to pictures that were
visions of light and atmosphere rather than pictorial anecdotes, and
the leaders of the new movement were being absorbed by both academies.
Absorption by the old enemy was, however, not the fate of all the
revolutionaries, for several, including their earliest leader, Wilson
Steer, maintained an attitude of no compromise. Neither did the battle
with academic conventions end with the work of the two groups of
artists named. It was carried on into the new century and linked up
with new movements by the International Society of Painters, Sculptors
and Gravers, founded, with Whistler as President and Lavery as
Vice-President, in 1898.
The outstanding painters of the Impressionist movement in this country
represented all phases of modern art and considerable variety of
individual expression. There were Walter Sickert, Maitland and Roussel,
who received early inspiration from Whistler; the realists of the
Newlyn School led by Stanhope Forbes, and deriving their art from
Bastien Lepage; and more individual and, consequently, less easily
classified, such painters as George Clausen, John S. Sargent, Wilson
Steer, William Rothenstein, Frank Brangwyn, William Nicholson, William
Orpen and, later on, Augustus John; whilst standing apart from any
particular “movement,” but none the less modern, were Charles Conder,
Dudley Hardy, Maurice Greiffenhagen, Robert Fowler, Sidney H. Sime,
Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. The Glasgow School included
most of the Scottish painters who became subjects of discussion at
the Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition promoted by Sir Coutts Lindsay, on
the suggestion of Clausen, in 1890. Among the men from the north who
were either associated with the Glasgow group or in sympathy with its
bid for freedom were John Lavery, James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, E.
A. Hornel, T. Millie Dow, George Henry, James Pryde, D. Y. Cameron,
Harrington Mann, W. Y. Macgregor and, at a later date, J. T. Peploe and
John Duncan Fergusson.
Out of this wealth of artistic genius it would be idle to classify
or to associate any single painter finally with any definite group
of painters, even though he had deliberately allied himself with
one or the other schools or coteries. The really big men of the
period can only be classified in so indefinite a way as to make such
classification almost worthless. The artistic associations of the
period are interesting from another point of view. They prove the
existence not only of widespread activity in painting, but of a healthy
desire for that camaraderie which hitherto, with the exception of the
friendships of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, had been almost confined
to Paris. But if classification is impossible or unnecessary it is
quite permissible to show how remarkably the artists of the time were
grouped by the prevailing modern tendency. And it is interesting to
note that, although the forward movement in pictorial art absolved
itself from all charges of literariness, its very existence was a
part of that trend of modern ideas which was affecting all the arts.
In literature the tendency was called Realism, in the graphic arts it
was called Impressionism. In this book I have called it--the search
for reality. That search was the culmination of all the activities
and changes of the nineteenth century. And in the last decade of the
century it saw the human mind fall back upon individual preference as
the surest guide to the fine arts and the bigger and more difficult art
of life.
Every painter of the Nineties who stood for modernity strove to use
his own personality and his own experience as the test of his art. He
may have said that he would paint things as they are, but in his heart
he knew that that was an impossible ideal. Those painters of genius
who had set out with the intention had ended always by painting their
own particular view of things, and modern art-philosophy sought to
prove, and succeeded in proving, that such results justified the means.
Auguste Rodin, who is the greatest, as well as the most realistic and
most personal, of modern sculptors, insisted upon the reverent and
exact copying of Nature as a means towards personal expression. And as
a further proof that naturalism may produce personal variety, one has
but to remember the Pre-Raphaelites, who were as devoted in the pursuit
of natural exactitude as any of the Impressionists; but, with the
possible exception of Ford Madox Brown, they never produced a canvas
that was not romantic and literary, and, in spite of the most devoted
attention to Nature, unnatural. The cause of this was that, whilst
talking much of Nature, they were not inspired by physical reality
at all. They were essentially a group of thinkers and visionaries,
and the whole of the movement was book-inspired. It was the result
of life approached by way of the Arthurian and the Biblical legends,
Dante and Shakespeare, and the observation of natural things always
subserved this literary interest. The Pre-Raphaelites brought with them
a fine æsthetic sense and high purpose, and some of them could draw,
and all of them paint, but, without any intention of under-estimating
their achievement, it must be admitted that they never succeeded in
doing more than represent in paint what had already been realised in
literature.
The Impressionists adopted the opposite course. They treated the art
of painting as the medium of actual sight. What could be seen rather
than what could be thought or imagined was the business of their art.
This did not mean the ultimate eradication of thought from painting,
but it did mean that thought must take second place to vision. Where
thought existed in the artist it was bound to show in his work, but
that work was primarily a view of life arranged in tones and values of
colour and light. As a matter of fact, the Impressionist paintings do
actually reveal abundance of thought, and nowadays it is quite easy to
see that the movement was even more intellectual than Pre-Raphaelitism;
but never in the literary sense. In this country Impressionism did
not reach its logical conclusion. The older English movement had its
uncompromising Holman Hunt, as Impressionism in France had its Manet,
but the modernists of the Nineties in this country recognised no
logic of progress save idiosyncrasy or circumstance. For that reason
the period produced no convention in painting. It borrowed much from
France and something from Germany, it defended its adopted ideas with
spirit, it compromised where and when it liked, and it argued about the
meaning of art, sometimes as if a definition would confirm or compel
a renaissance. For the rest, it produced many competent painters, but
fewer than might have been expected who could be said to represent the
peculiar genius of the age.
The characteristic artists of the period were drawn from no particular
school; indeed, in many instances they were quite remote from all
definable groups. Aubrey Beardsley, although deriving in some measure
from Burne-Jones, might easily have stepped out of eighteenth-century
France with Charles Conder; Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon,
Robert Fowler and Maurice Greiffenhagen, although recalling
past influences, have each sufficient individuality to stand as
manifestations of the more definite spirit of the period without in any
single instance representing all that was modern or strikingly new.
Charles Conder represents perhaps more than any of these artists,
except Beardsley, the peculiar artificial mood of the Nineties. His
work has the indefinable hot-house atmosphere of the decadence. The
drowsiness of a replete civilisation idles through his paintings, and
to the innate luxury of his themes he added the material luxury of the
silk panels and fans which he loved to decorate. Nothing is decisive
about his vision save the voluptuousness of doing nothing. His world
is all languorous and dreamful, and there is no movement except the
occasional strolling or dancing of stately or delicate persons and
the swaying of fans; no sound save the rustle of silk or the music of
faintly touched harps or viols; no odours save those of flowers and
scented bodies; and for place and boundary there is only colour--colour
suggesting form, suggesting all corporeal things, suggesting even
itself, for Conder never more than hints at the vivid possibilities of
life, more than a hint might waken his puppets from their Laodicean
dream. “Conder’s women are not timeless,” writes Charles Ricketts,
“they have forgotten their age; but this, like beauty, is often a
mere matter of opinion! We shall find their histories on the stage
of Beaumarchais: they have passed into the realms of immortality not
in the paintings of Watteau but in the melodies of Mozart. They are
‘The Countess,’ Susanna, Donna Elvira; all are anxious to pardon--they
are peeping at the moving pageant, for Don Juan was seen but a moment
since. But what can have detained Donna Anna? It is so late, the ‘Queen
of the Night’ has sung her great aria, the air is close--there are too
many roses!” Too many roses! Charles Conder’s art is in that phrase.
It is the art of the privileged, recalling the decadent folk who were
the prey of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’ romance. Watteau, Fragonard
and Monticelli have each contributed something towards the making of
this delicate art, but, as Ricketts points out, “the rest of his art
is modern, and was possible only at the time in which it appeared.”
If the _Fêtes Galantes_ of Watteau became literature in Paul
Verlaine, they were translated back into painting by Charles Conder;
and both he and the poet added to them their own special sense of the
world-weariness of modernity.
[Illustration: THE ARRIVAL OF PRINCE CHARMING
_By Charles Conder_
_From the picture in the possession of Mr. Grant
Richards_]
Equally characteristic of the Nineties, but of a more virile type,
were James Pryde and William Nicholson. Pryde took the life about
him as his model, the town folk and the country folk, and with
power and originality made them live again in paint. Nicholson saw
both the countryside and the town with a new vision which combined
when transferred to his canvases reticence of colour and power of
suggestion. During the period his masterly series of woodcuts in
colour were widely known and appreciated at first through the series
of portraits in _The New Review_, and later in such volumes as
_London Types_ and the _Almanack of Twelve Sports_. It was Pryde and
Nicholson, under the title of the Beggarstaff Brothers, who gave the
poster movement, already well established in France, something like
a firm basis in this country. They were not alone in the field, but
it was their work which made British genius a factor to be reckoned
with in a peculiarly modern branch of art. Each had studied in Paris
and had doubtless come under the spell of the striking poster work of
Toulouse-Lautrec, but the designs afterwards produced by them were in
no sense imitative. Indeed, as Charles Hiatt has pointed out, their
posters were intensely English in character. “In their way,” he said,
“they are as racy of the soil as the caricatures of Rowlandson, the
paintings of Morland, or the drawings of Charles Keene.” The work of
the Beggarstaff Brothers was first seen at the Poster Exhibition held
at the Royal Aquarium, Westminster, in 1894. Their exhibit included
the masterly _Hamlet_, stencilled in four colours, and a number of
sketches and studies for posters of all kinds. The attractive use
of simple masses of colour without shading, in fine, the entirely
successful application of the idea of the stencil to poster work, made
the artists famous at a bound, and their posters became familiar and
altogether satisfying features of the street hoardings. It is worth
recording, however, that although the Beggarstaff Brothers won so much
appreciation, there were people who could see nothing but blotches
of paint in the new work. This may be illustrated by a story told
of an early adventure of the artists with a client. The Beggarstaff
Brothers had been commissioned to produce a poster for the Drury Lane
Pantomime, 1895–1896. The result was that classic among posters, the
_Cinderella_. But the work did not find favour with Sir Augustus
Harris; and the famous manager was supported in his dislike by Dan
Leno, who thought the poster looked as though someone had spilt ink
down it. The situation was saved by the fortunate arrival of Phil May,
who, realising the state of affairs, turned the position by innocently
congratulating Sir Augustus on having been so fortunate in obtaining
such an effective advertisement.
The chief characteristics of painting in the Nineties were personal
courage and adventurous technique. Years of strife with convention
had at length cleared a path for free play in both, and, although
skirmishing still continued, those who desired to be themselves in
paint had at least as much encouragement as their brothers in the
literary camp.
The works of painters who thought and dreamt about life were, of
course, as numerous as ever, but no exhibition was complete without
specimens of the work of those painters who added to thought and
imagination the revived faculty of careful observation. And even modern
artists who remained visionaries and dreamers adopted a symbolism of
form and colour which possessed a new delicacy and an approximation
to observed knowledge in keeping with the tendencies of the period
though of earlier inspiration. Ricketts and Charles Shannon achieved
rare qualities of imaginative expression with fine technique; Maurice
Greiffenhagen and Robert Fowler gave Impressionism a romantic meaning,
and symbolism found exponents in these painters and others, and in the
work of many black and white artists and pen-draughtsmen. But the final
pictorial achievement of the period is not to be found in one artist,
but in many; perhaps not in any painter or group of painters, but in
the fresh possibilities of vision thrown open by the whole artistic
effort of the decade, possibilities which led always to the most modern
of all accomplishments--the art of looking at life in one’s own way.
It is not easy to single out painters from among the large number
contributing to this movement, but a fair idea of the more normal
tendencies which have survived from the time may be acquired by a
consideration of three typical _fin de siècle_ artists whose work
has maintained its high quality and distinction down to to-day. These
painters are John Lavery, William Rothenstein and Frank Brangwyn.
Each of them represents a compromise with Impressionism. They are
Impressionists, each in his own way, but the way of each is to add to
an essentially realistic idea some personal quality which prevents
that idea ever reaching its full logical conclusion. Lavery is in
the Velasquez-Whistler descent, and he possesses technical reserves
which might, had he been a Frenchman, have urged him into the camp
of scientific Impressionism. He preferred to use his modern skill,
and all that modernity had taught him in the way of vision, in mating
reality with sentiment. He lacks Whistler’s decorative sense, and even
when he is most realistic he never achieves the frankness of a Manet
or a Degas. But taking what he wants from reality, and adding what he
pleases from human sentiment (which is also reality), he has created a
series of paintings with some of the technical qualities of Whistler’s
portraits, but nothing of that profound sense of character which
immortalises those works.
William Rothenstein carries Impressionism further than Lavery, and
instead of sentiment he adds a remarkably keen sense of reality to
thoughtfulness and spirituality. His pictures are interpretations. In
all of them intellect plays an important part; but he is too much of an
artist ever to allow mind finally to dominate imagination or vision.
He recalls George Frederick Watts in his concern for what is lofty
in thought and inspiring in idea, although he has never illustrated
abstract ideas after the manner of Watts, nor are his pictures
didactic. His works impress by quiet profundity of theme and fine
qualities of light and colour. His test for art, as expressed in the
introductory chapter of his essay on _Goya_ (1900), can be applied
with success to his own pictures: “For however many reasons men may
give for the admiration of masterpieces,” he said, “it is in reality
the probity and intensity with which the master has carried out his
work, by which they are dominated; and it is his method of overcoming
difficulties, not of evading them, which gives style, breadth and
becoming mystery to his execution. And this quality of intensity,
whether it be the result of curiosity for form, or of a profound
imagination for nature, which lives, as it were, upon the surface of
a drawing, or of a picture, is the best test we have for what we may
consider as art.” Rothenstein has many of the characteristics of the
Nineties--curiosity about life and thought, personality in vision and
statement, and that sincerity of aim which is originality; but he is
never decadent, if only for the reason that he never looked upon art as
a thing in itself, but as a means towards the fulfilment of life.
Impressionism and romanticism meet in the art of Frank Brangwyn,
as Impressionism and sentiment meet in that of John Lavery, and
Impressionism and intellect in Rothenstein. But more than that--a
picture by Brangwyn is a bridge between private luxury and public
splendour. His art suggests the big virile world made splendid by
the romance of action. His pictures, even his etchings, seem to have
small relationship with what are called the fine arts; they are not
to be associated with dainty things: the bric-à-brac of drawing-rooms
and the baubles of collectors and connoisseurs. Brangwyn’s work
has no connection with such things. He is as far removed from them
as Walt Whitman is from the writers of drawing-room love lyrics.
Everything about his work is large and vigorous. His vivid colours,
his heroic masses of form, his bold lighting, even apart from any
bigness of canvas, suggest the public place rather than the room.
Frank Brangwyn is, in fact, a decorative painter. Impressionism in its
less imaginative aspects hardly touched him; he learnt from it what
all artists could learn without endangering imagination or individual
genius--the use of light in relation to colour and form. And this
knowledge he applied to his own inborn sense of design in the creation
of those richly patterned mural paintings which in themselves are
little short of an artistic renaissance.
It will be seen from these three examples that the painters of the
period were wide-ranged in vision. Yet even they symbolise little more
than the broad and normal phases of painting. Such painters, to name
but three more, as Walter Sickert, James Pryde and E. A. Hornel, are as
different in every way from Lavery, Rothenstein and Brangwyn, as they
are from one another. But they also represent the period. Sickert by
his mastery over his materials and by the individuality of his outlook;
Pryde by equal mastery and equal individuality in addition to rare
insight into character; and Hornel by his unique sense of decoration
and colour. Such variety among painters was hitherto unknown in this
country, and apart from the vitality it reveals, it indicates also a
complete victory over academic convention, and the creation of such a
margin of freedom as would permit of any painter thenceforth expressing
himself in his own way. This freedom, subject of battle for several
decades, was consummated in the Nineties.