strikingly mannered was it that it appealed to almost all the young
and undiscriminating men whose work lay in the rendering of pictorial
architecture. “Go to,” said the Average Artist in “the picturesque,”
“I will sit down and make a drawing in the manner of Mr. Railton.”
And he did, generally, it may be observed, from a photograph, and in
the undistracting seclusion of his own room. This sort of artistic
influenza, which nearly all the younger men caught at one time or
another, was very dangerous to true art. But it could not possibly
last; it was so resourceless. Always we were invited to glance at the
same sky and an unchanging rendering of buildings, whether old or new,
in the same condition of supposedly picturesque decrepitude. Everything
in this mannerism wore the romantic air of the Moated Grange and
radiated Mrs. Radcliffe, dungeons, spectres, and death, whether the
subject was a ruinated castle or a new warehouse. All this has grown
offensive: we want more sobriety. This apotheosis of raging skies and
falling smuts, of impending chimneys, crumbling stones, and tottering
walls was only a personal manner. Its imitators have rendered it
ridiculous.
The chief merits of such topographical and archæological drawings are
that they be truthful and reverent. If art is ever to approach the
documentary stage, to be used as the record of facts, it is in this
matter. To flood the country with representations of old buildings
that are not so much pictures of them as exercises in an exaggerated
personal manner, is to deserve ill at the hands of all who would have
preserved to them the appearance of places that are passing away. The
illustrations to such books, say, as Mr. Loftie’s _Inns of Court_ or
his _Westminster Abbey_ are of no historic or artistic value whatever;
they are merely essays in a wild and weird manner of which we are tired
in the originator of it; which we loathe in those who imitate its worst
faults. We require a sober style in this work, after being drunken so
long with its so-called picturesqueness, which, rightly considered, is
but impressionism, ill seen and uninstructed.
No one has exercised so admirable a method, whether in landscape, in
portraiture, or in architecture, as Sir George Reid, but his work
is not readily accessible for the study it invites. It is scholarly
and expressive, eloquent of the character of his subject, free from
redundancies. It is elaborate or suggestive on due occasion, and,
although the style is so distinguished, you always feel that every
drawing by this stylist is really and truly a representation of the
person, place, or thing he has drawn, and not a mere pretext for an
individual handling; no braggart assumption of “side.”
The dangers of following in a slavish manner the eccentricities of
well-known men are exemplified in the work of those illustrators who
ape the whimsies of the impressionist Degas. What Degas may do may
nearly always be informed with distinction, but the illustrators who
reproduce, not his genius, but an outstanding feature of it, are
singularly narrow. If Degas has painted a picture of the play with the
orchestra in the foreground and the bass-viol looming immensely up
three parts of the composition, the third-rate impressionists also lug
in a bass-viol; if he has shown a ballet-girl with apparently only one
leg, they always draw one-legged _coryphées_, and remain incapable of
conceiving them as bipeds.
Caldecott is a dangerous man to copy. He was, first and last, a
draughtsman, and a draughtsman whose every dot and line were eloquent.
There is no technique that you can lay hold of in his work, but only
characterization, which is more frequently caricature. Caldecott would
never have made a serious illustrator; in burlesque he was immense, and
no artist could desire a better monument than his _Picture Books_. His
reputation has fallen greatly of late, notwithstanding the delightful
_John Gilpin_ and the others of that inimitable series; but his repute
had stood higher to-day if his private letters to his friends and
other unconsidered trifles had never been collected and published,
ghoul-like, after his death. Pandering to the market has almost killed
Caldecott’s repute, for the undiscriminating public were invited to
admire reproductions of hasty sketches never intended for publicity.
There is character in Mr. Phil May’s work, and humour, surprisingly set
forth with a marvellous economy of line. His is a gay and festive muse,
that is most at home where the tide of life runs strongest and deepest,
with wine-bubbles breaking “most notoriously,” as Mr. Kipling might
say, upon its surface; with theatres, music-halls, and Gaiety bars
ranged along its banks in profusion. There is much human nature in
Mr. May. Also in Mr. Greiffenhagen; but a different kind. He has gone
chiefly to the boudoir and the drawing-room for his subjects, and has
rendered them with a resolute impressionism and a thorough discarding
of cross-hatch that make a lasting impression with the beholder.
There is a certain Christmas number, 1892, of the _Lady’s Pictorial_
with memorable drawings by him; they are in wash and lithographic
crayon, but may only be noted here in passing. He has a gift of novel,
unhackneyed composition, and he sees the figure for himself, and draws
it in with a daring but right and striking manner.
There has arisen of late years a school of illustration peculiarly
English—the so to call it “Decorative School.” It is a new and higher
incarnation of the pre-Raphaelite movement. The brotherhood did good
work, not at all commensurate with the amount of attention it received,
but beyond all praise in the conventions it founded; and, historically
considered, Rossetti and his fellows are great, and Blake is greater,
because he was an inspired visionary with a kink in his brain, out of
which flowed imaginings the most gorgeous and original. But the
decorative men of to-day are doing even better work—masculine,
convincing, racy of this soil. It is chiefly admirable because it gives
us, in these days of “actuality,” of photography, and reproductions
direct from photographs, a new outlook upon life. English decorative
illustration is, with but few exceptions, possessed of a fine romantic
fancy, poetic, and at the same time healthy and virile and eminently
sane, and it will live. There is great hope for the future of this
school, while the imported styles of Vierge and Rico and other masters
used to sunnier skies, admirable beyond expression in their own places,
droop and languish in the nor’-easterly winds of England, and their
tradition becomes attenuated in passing through so many hands. Their
descendants, from Abbey down to Pennell and the whole crowd of those
who love not wisely but too well, have brought these fine exotic
conventions down to the merest shadows of shades.
Mr. Walter Crane has, any time these last ten years, been the great
Apostle of Decoration _plus_ Socialism. It has been given him in this
wise to make (in theory) the lion to lie down with the lamb (and yet
for the lamb to remain outside the lion with his destiny of mutton
still in perspective), and he has proclaimed in parables the
possibility of mixing oil and water. He has perpetrated a cartoon for
the Socialistic, if not Anarchist, First of May, and therein he has
striven to decoratively treat the British Workman. But although Mr.
Crane has a pretty trick of decoration, he was worsted in that bout,
for the British Plumber or the Irish Hodman is stubborn material for
decoration, and their spouses as festal nymphs are not convincing
visions. Again, he has achieved a weird series of cartoons upon the
walls of the Red Cross Hall in praise of Democratic Valour, in which he
has unsuccessfully attempted to conventionalize rescuing firemen and
heroic police. Such bravery deserved a better fate. Also Mr. Crane has
written much revolutionary verse in praise of brotherhood and equality,
and now he has accepted the mastership of a Governmental art school,
under the direction of that not very revolutionary body, the Committee
of Council for Education (Science and Art Department). Decoration
should be made of sterner stuff! His industry has been prodigious. Even
now a bibliography of him is in the making; and yet shall it be said
that it is difficult in the great mass of his work to find many items
altogether satisfactory? It may be feared it is so. For one thing,
his anatomy is habitually at fault; and yet has he not informed an
interviewer from the _Pall Mall Gazette_ that long years since he had
ceased to draw from the model?
That wheel within wheels, the so-called Birmingham School, is
attracting attention just now, and men begin to prophesy of deeds from
out the midlands. But once upon a time there was a Newlyn School, was
there not? Where is that party now? Its foremost members have won to
the honours of the Royal Academy, and its mission is done. But it is
time to talk of schools when work has been done. Of course it is very
logical that good work should come from Birmingham. The sense of beauty
is stronger in those who live in midst of dirt and grime. Instance the
Glasgow school of impressionists. But the evidence of Birmingham at
present is but a touching follow-on to the styles of Mr. Crane and Mr.
Sumner, and to the ornament of Mr. Lewis Day. Indeed, the decorative
work of the students at the National Art Training Schools may be put in
the formula of one-third Crane, and the remaining two-thirds Heywood
Sumner and Lewis Day, an amalgam ill-considered and poorly wrought.
But indeed Mr. Heywood Sumner’s work has a note of distinction. He
does not confuse Socialist propaganda with ornament, and is not always
striving to show with emphasis of line in pen and ink that Capital is
the natural enemy of Labour, and that a silk hat on a rich man’s head
may justly be defined as so many loaves of bread (or pots of beer) in
the wrong place. That is for Mr. Crane and Mr. William Morris to prove;
and, really, anything wicked can be proven of such a hideous object.
But the onus of bringing the guilt home to it and the wearer of it does
not produce good art. Indeed, decorative art is not catholic; it has
no sort of commerce with everyday life or with the delineation of any
times so recent as the early years of the Victorian era. Its field lies
only in poetic imaginings, in fancy, and, most emphatically, not in
fact. When Mr. Crane, for instance, takes to idealising the heroic acts
of policemen, the impulse does credit to his heart, but the results
are not flattering to his head. Fortunately he does not often go these
lengths, and no one else of the decorative idea has been equally
courageous, save indeed a Mr. Beardsley, who “decoratively” illustrated
Orpheus at the Lyceum Theatre; and those illustrations in the _Pall
Mall Budget_, March 16, 1893, certainly were very dreadful.
An exception to the general beauty of recent decorative work is the
incomprehensible and at the same time unlovely practice of this
eccentric. Mr. Charles Ricketts’ work, although its meaning may often
be so subtly symbolical that it is not to be understood except by the
elect,—never without the aid of a glossary of symbolism,—is always
graced with interesting technicalities, and his draughtsmanship is of
the daintiest; but what of meaning is conveyed to the mind and what
of beauty to the eye in this work of Mr. Beardsley’s, that has been
somewhat spoken of lately? It has imagination certainly, but morbid and
neurotic, with a savour of Bethlehem Hospital and the charnel-house;
it is eccentric apparently with an eccentricity that clothes bad
draughtsmanship, and incongruous with an incongruity that suggests
the uninstructed enthusiasm of the provincial mind. It exhibits a
patchwork-quilt kind of eclecticism, born of a fleeting glance at
Durer; of a nodding acquaintance with all prominent modern decoration
and an irrelevant _soupçon_ of Renaissance ornament; like the work of a
lithographic draughtsman, a designer of bill-heads, roaming fancy free.
The practice of Mr. Selwyn Image has a devotional and meditative cast.
He has made some remarkable drawings for the _Hobby Horse_ in the
manner of the missal-painters, both in spirit and execution, and he
steadfastly keeps the art of the monkish scriptorium in view, and seems
to echo the sentiments of the rapturous maidens in _Patience_, “Let
us be Early English ere it is too late.” And he _is_ Early English to
excellent purpose.
It is a gross error to hold that decorative art is impossible under
present social conditions, and unpardonable to attempt to link
decoration and design to Socialist propaganda. Art of all possible
application never flourished so well as under the feudal system, and
never sank so low as it did when Democracy and the Trouser came in
together.
The great advantages of Art over Photography are its personal
qualities. The camera is impersonal, and will ever be a scientific
instrument. You can, like the ingenious Mr. H. P. Robinson, pose
figures, and with a combination of negatives concoct a composition
which is some sort of cousin-german to a picture; but if you can do all
this, you might go a little farther and make a picture without the aid
of a camera. It would be personal, and, without a signature, signed all
over with the unmistakable mark of style or manner, like Constable’s
paintings.
It seems unlikely that any mechanical processes, save the strictly
autographic, which reproduce line, will be of permanent artistic value.
No photogravure will be sought for and prized in years to come as the
old etchings and mezzotints are valued. Those elaborate photogravure
plates from popular or artistic pictures (the terms are not synonymous)
which crowd the print-sellers’ shops to-day, at five or ten guineas,
will not long hence be accounted dear at so many shillings, simply
because they lack the personal note. Meanwhile, mezzotints and
etchings, other than the “commercial” etching, will become inversely
expensive.
In that brackish flood of “bitter cries” to which we have been
subjected of late years, the wail of the wood-engraver was easily to be
distinguished, and we heard that his occupation was gone. But has it?
No, nor will it go. No tint nor half-tone process can ever render
sufficiently well the wash drawings that the best engravers render
so admirably, with an entire subjection of their own individuality
unthought of twenty years ago. The wood-engraver, as one who imposes
restrictions upon technique, has had his day; but as a conscientious
and skilful workman, who renders faithfully the personality of the
artist he engraves, he flourishes, and will continue to flourish.
Otherwise, there is no hope for him, let Mr. Linton say what he will.
He will remain because he can preserve the personal note.
Half-tone processes are as tricky as Puck and as inconstant. You never
know the exact result you will get from any given drawing. Half a dozen
blocks from the same drawing will give, each one, a different result,
because so much depends upon the fraction of a second, more or less,
in making the negative; but all of them agree in presenting an aspect
similar to that obtained on looking through the wire blind of some
Philistine window upon the street. In all cases the edge, the poignancy
of the subject, is taken off, and, in the case of the process-block,
several intermediate tones go as well, with, frequently, the result of
an unnatural lighting “that never was on land or sea,” and it may be
hoped never will be.
No doubt half-tone processes will continue to be more and more widely
used, chiefly because they are several times cheaper than a good wood
engraving, and because, so far as mere documentary evidence goes,
they are good enough for illustrated journalism. But for bookwork,
for anything that is not calculated for an ephemeral consideration,
half-tone processes are only to be used with the most jealous care.
As regards the half-tone processes employed to reproduce photographs, I
take leave to say that no one will, a hundred years hence, prize them
for any quality. The necessary reticulation of their surface subtracts
from them something of the documentary value of the photograph, and,
deriving directly from photographs, they have no personal or artistic
interest.
But their present use touches the professional draughtsman nearly,
for in illustrated journalism half-tone is very frequently used in
reproducing photographs of places and people without the aid of the
artist, and it is no consolation for a man who finds his occupation
going for him to consider that these direct photographic processes have
no permanent interest. It is the new version of the old tale of the
stage-coach _versus_ the railway engine, to his mind, and he is apt
to think that as a craftsman he is fast following the wood-engraver.
But it is safe to say that although the mediocrities will suffer, or
be forced, like the miniature-painter who turned daguerrotypist and
then blossomed forth as a photographer, to study practical evolution,
the artists of style and distinction will rather gain than lose by a
further popularity of cheap photographic blocks. The illustrated papers
and magazines will not be so freely open to them as before, but in
the illustration of books will lie their chief field, and who knows
but that by such a time the pen-drawing and the drawing in wash will
have won at last to the picture-frame and the art galleries. There’s
distinction for you!
So much to show the value of personality.
Still it remains that, although the personal element will always be
valued, the fact—to paraphrase a sounding Ruskinian anathema—gives no
reason for flinging your identity in the face of your contemporaries,
or even of posterity (this last a long shot which few, with all the will
in the world, will be able to achieve). You may be startlingly original
and brilliant in technique, and be received with the acclaim that
always awaits a novelty; but if your personality be so exaggerated that
you allow it to override the due presentment of your subject, why,
then, your plaudits will not be of very long continuance.
PAINTERS’ PEN-DRAWINGS.
It is to the painters that we owe some curious and original effects in
pen-drawing, that no professional pen-draughtsman who has studied the
science of reproduction could have given us, however independent his
attitude towards process.
[Illustration: 7¾ × 5. PASTURAGE.
_From a drawing by Mr. Alfred Hartley._]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MR. BONNAT, BY HIMSELF.]
Painters who have known nothing whatever of processes have from time
to time been called upon to make pen-drawings from their paintings for
reproduction in illustrated exhibition catalogues, and their drawings
have frequently been both of the most ludicrously impossible character
from the process point of view, and bad from the independent penman’s
standpoint. But a percentage of this painters’ pen-work, done as it was
with a free hand and an unprejudiced brain, is curiously instructive. A
very great number of painters’ pen-drawings have been made up to within
the last few years (since which time half-tone process blocks produced
from photos of their pictures have superseded them), and painters have
in no small measure helped to advance the science of process-work,
merely by reason of the difficulty of reproducing their drawings
adequately, and the consequent renewed efforts of the process-man
toward the adequate translation of their frequently untranslateable
qualities. The graver has been pressed into the service of process
partly on their account, and the roulette has been used freely to
assuage the crudities resulting on the block from drawings utterly
unsuitable for straight-away processing.
In this connection half-tone processes have done inestimable harm,
for, to-day, the catalogues and the illustrated papers are filled with
photographic reproductions of paintings where in other days autographic
sketches by the painters themselves were used to give a value that is
now lacking to these records of exhibitions.
They have frequently a heavy hand, these painters, and are prodigal
of their ink; moreover, they have not the paralyzing dread of
an immaculate sheet of white cardboard that seizes upon the
black-and-white man (so to call the illustrator), who is brought up
with the fear of the process-man before him.
Thus you will find Mr. Wyllie make pen-sketches from his pictures
with a masterful hand, and a pen (apparently a quill) that plumbs the
deepest depths of the inkpot, and produces a robustious drawing that
wrings conviction out of one by the thickness and surety of its lines;
or again, Mr. Blake Wirgman shows equal vigour and directness with
portraits in pen-and-ink, replicas in little of his oil-paintings. One
could desire nothing more masculine than the accompanying illustration
from his hand.
[Illustration: 18 × 10½. TOWING PATH, ABINGDON.
_From a drawing by Mr. David Murray._]
[Illustration: A PORTRAIT FROM A DRAWING BY MR. T. BLAKE WIRGMAN.]
A striking exception to these is seen in Mr. Alfred Hartley’s drawing
of a pasturage. It is full of tender, pearly greys, and is drawn with
the lightest of hands, but with a peculiar disposition of pen-strokes
that no professional pen-draughtsman would employ, because of his
constant care to give the process-man the easiest of problems. And
the autocrat of the rocking-bath and the etching-room would veto such
work as this; yet, you will observe, it comes excellently well by the
ordinary zinc processes.
But with Mr. David Murray’s large pen-drawing it was another matter.
The greyness of the ink with which it was drawn and the extreme tenuity
of its lines rendered it impossible of adequate reproduction except by
the swelled gelatine process which has been employed. The result is
admirable; all the fine grey lines in the sky are reproduced and give
an excellent effect.
The portrait of the painter, Mr. Bonnat, by himself, is one of the
most suggestive pen-drawings that can be found anywhere. It shows what
admirable effects of light and shade and modelling can be obtained even
with the heavy hand, and it is worthy careful study.
Unfortunately the illustrations in the long series of _Academy Notes_,
in which so many autographic sketches by painters appear, are almost
useless for study and comparison, because of the extreme reduction to
which they have been subjected. This is greatly to be deplored, for
the tendency of the times is more and more towards drawing for the
limitations of process, not only in journalism, but in the more
permanent illustrations of magazines and books. All this tends to bring
about a hard and formal line, to establish a dry and unsatisfactory
academic manner, of which the painter’s pen sketches are the very
antithesis. It is always well to remember that the only valid reason
why process should live is that it enables the draughtsman to live his
life at first hand; that is the first and last argument in favour of
modern methods of reproduction.
[Illustration]
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London, N.W. Nov 16th 1893. _189_
[Illustration: Harry Furniss’s Illustrated Weekly London Letter]
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