In the seventeenth century were Poussin and Claude; in the eighteenth
Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, and many lesser lights--Fragonard, Pater,
and Lancret. But notwithstanding the austere grandeur of Poussin and
the beautiful, if somewhat too reasonable poetry of Claude, the
infinite perfection of Watteau, the charm of that small French
Velasquez Chardin, and the fascinations and essentially French genius
of all this group (Poussin and Claude were entirely Roman), I think we
must place France's artistic period in the nineteenth century.
Nineteenth century art began in France in the last years of the
eighteenth century. It began well, for it began with its greatest
painters--Ingres, Corot, and Delacroix. Ingres was born in 1780,
Gericault in 1791, Corot in 1796, Delacroix in 1798, Diaz in 1809,
Dupré in 1812, Rousseau in 1812, Jacques in 1813, Meissonier in 1815,
Millet in 1815, Troyon in 1816, Daubigny in 1817, Courbet in 1819,
Fromentin in 1820, Monticelli in 1824, Puvis de Chavannes in 1824,
Cabanel in 1825, Hervier in 1827, Vollon in 1833, Manet in 1833, Degas
in 1834. With a little indulgence the list might be considerably
enlarged.
The circumstances in which this artistic manifestation took place were
identical with the circumstances which brought about every one of the
great artistic epochs. It came upon France as a consequence of huge
national aspiration, when nationhood was desired and disaster had
joined men together in struggle, and sent them forth on reckless
adventure. It has been said that art is decay, the pearl in the
oyster; but such belief seems at variance with any reading of history.
The Greek sculptors came after Salamis and Marathon; the Italian
renaissance came when Italy was distracted with revolution and was
divided into opposing states. Great empires have not produced great
men. Art came upon Holland after heroic wars in which the Dutchmen
vehemently asserted their nationhood, defending their country against
the Spaniard, even to the point of letting in the sea upon the
invaders. Art came upon England when England was most adventurous,
after the victories of Marlborough. Art came upon France after the
great revolution, after the victories of Marengo and Austerlitz, after
the burning of Moscow. A unique moment of nationhood gave birth to a
long list of great artists, just as similar national enthusiasm gave
birth to groups of great artists in England, in Holland, in Florence,
in Venice, in Athens.
Having determined the century of France's artistic period we will ask
where we shall place it amongst the artist period of the past.
Comparison with Greece, Italy, or Venice is manifestly impossible; the
names of Rembrandt, Hals, Ruysdael, Peter de Hoogh, Terburg, and Cuyp
give us pause. We remember the names of Ingres, Delacroix, Corot,
Millet, and Degas. Even the divine name of Ingres cannot save the
balance from sinking on the side of Holland. Then we think of
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Wilson, and Morland, and wonder how
they compare with the Frenchmen. The best brains were on the French
side, they had more pictorial talent, and yet the school when taken as
a whole is not so convincing as the English. Why, with better brains,
and certainly more passion and desire of achievement, does the French
school fall behind the English? Why, notwithstanding its extraordinary
genius, does it come last in merit as it comes last in time amongst
the world's artistic epochs? Has the nineteenth century brought any
new intention into art which did not exist before in England, Holland,
or Italy? Yes, the nineteenth century has brought a new intention into
art, and I think that it is this very new intention that has caused
the failure of the nineteenth century. To explain myself, I will have
to go back to first principles.
In the beginning the beauty of man was the artist's single theme.
Science had not then relegated man to his exact place in creation: he
reigned triumphant, Nature appearing, if at all, only as a kind of
aureole. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman artists saw nothing,
and cared for nothing, except man; the representation of his beauty,
his power, and his grandeur was their whole desire, whether they
carved or painted their intention, and I may say the result was the
same. The painting of Apelles could not have differed from the
sculpture of Phidias; painting was not then separated from her elder
sister. In the early ages there was but one art; even in Michael
Angelo's time the difference between painting and sculpture was so
slight as to be hardly worth considering. Is it possible to regard the
"Last Judgment" as anything else but a coloured bas-relief, more
complete and less perfect than the Greeks? Michael Angelo's artistic
outlook was the same as Phidias'. One chose the "Last Judgment" and
the other "Olympus", but both subjects were looked at from the same
point of view. In each instance the question asked was--what
opportunity do they afford for the display of marvellous human form?
And when Michael Angelo carved the "Moses" and painted the "St.
Jerome" he was as deaf and blind as any Greek to all other
consideration save the opulence and the magic of drapery, the
vehemence and the splendour of muscle. Nearly two thousand years had
gone by and the artistic outlook had not changed at all; three hundred
years have passed since Michael Angelo, and inthose three hundred
years what revolution has not been effected? How different our
estheticism, our aims, our objects, our desires, our aspiration, and
how different our art!
After Michael Angelo painting and sculpture became separate arts:
sculpture declined, and colour filled the whole artistic horizon. But
this change was the only change; the necessities of the new medium had
to be considered; but the Italian and Venetian painters continued to
view life and art from the same side. Michael Angelo chose his
subjects merely because of the opportunities they offered for the
delineation of form, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese chose theirs
merely for the opportunities they offered for the display of colour. A
new medium of expression had been discovered, that was all. The themes
of their pictures were taken from the Bible, if you will, but the
scenes they represented with so much pomp of colour were seen by them
through the mystery of legend, and the vision was again sublimated by
naive belief and primitive aspiration.
The stories of the Old and New Testaments were not anecdotes; faith
and ignorance had raised them above the anecdote, and they had become
epics, whether by intensity of religious belief--as in the case of the
monk of Fiesole--or by being given sublime artistic form--for paganism
was not yet dead in the world to witness Leonardo, Raphael, and Andrea
del Sarto. To these painters Biblical subjects were a mere pretext for
representing man in all his attributes; and when the same subjects
were treated by the Venetians, they were transformed in a pomp of
colour, and by an absence of all _true_ colour and by contempt for
history and chronology became epical and fantastical. It is only
necessary to examine any one of the works of the great Venetians to
see that they bestowed hardly a thought on the subject of their
pictures. When Titian painted the "Entombment of Christ", what did he
see? A contrast--a white body, livid and dead, carried by
full-blooded, red-haired Italians, who wept, and whose sorrow only
served to make them more beautiful. That is how he understood a
subject. The desire to be truthful was not very great, nor was the
desire to be new much more marked; to be beautiful was the first and
last letter of a creed of which we know very little to-day.
Art died in Italy, and the subject had not yet appeared; and at the
end of the sixteenth century the first painters of the great Dutch
school were born, and before 1650 a new school, entirely original,
having nothing in common with anything that had gone before, had
formulated its aestheticism and produced masterpieces. In these
masterpieces we find no suspicion of anything that might be called a
subject; the absence of subject is even more conspicuous in the
Dutchmen than in the Italians. In the Italian painters the subject
passed unperceived in a pomp of colour or a Pagan apotheosis of
humanity; in the Dutchmen it is dispensed with altogether. No longer
do we read of miracles or martyrdoms, but of the most ordinary
incidents of everyday life. Turning over the first catalogue to hand
of Dutch pictures, I read: "View of a Plain, with shepherd, cows, and
sheep in the foreground"; "The White Horse in the Riding School"; "A
Lady Playing the Virginal"; "Peasants Drinking Outside a Tavern";
"Peasants Drinking in a Tavern"; "Peasants Gambling Outside a Tavern";
"Brick-making in a Landscape"; "The Wind-mill"; "The Water-mill";
"Peasants Bringing Home the Hay". And so on, and so on. If we meet
with a military skirmish, we are not told where the skirmish took
place, nor what troops took part in the skirmish. "A Skirmish in a
Rocky Pass" is all the information that is vouchsafed to us. Italian
art is invention from end to end, in Dutch art no slightest trace of
invention is to be found; one art is purely imaginative, the other is
plainly realistic; and yet, at an essential point, the two arts
coincide; in neither does the subject prevail; and if Dutch art is
more truthful than Italian art, it is because they were unimaginative,
stay-at-home folk, whose feet did not burn for foreign travel, and
whose only resource was, therefore, to reproduce the life around them,
and into that no element of curiosity could come. For their whole
country was known to them; even when they left their native town they
still continued to paint what they had seen since they were little
children.
And, like Italian, Dutch art died before the subject had appeared. It
was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject
really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or
phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay. I think
Greuze was the first to conceive a picture after the fashion of a
scene in a play--I mean those domestic dramas which he invented, and
in which the interest of the subject so clearly predominates--"The
Prodigal Son", for instance. In this picture we have the domestic
drama exactly as a stage manager would set it forth. The indignant
father, rising from table, prepares to anathematise the repentant son,
who stands on the threshold, the weeping mother begs forgiveness for
her son, the elder girl advances shyly, the younger children play with
their toys, and the serving-girl drops the plate of meat which she is
bringing in. And ever since the subject has taken first place in the
art of France, England, and Germany, and in like measure as the
subject made itself felt, so did art decline.
For the last hundred years painters seem to have lived in libraries
rather than in studios. All literatures and all the sciences have been
pressed into the service of painting, and an Academy catalogue is in
itself a liberal education. In it you can read choice extracts from
the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Goethe, from Dante. You can dip into
Greek and Latin literature, history--ancient and modern--you can learn
something of all mythologies-Pagan, Christian, and Hindoo; if your
taste lies in the direction of Icelandic legends, you will not be
disappointed in your sixpennyworth. For the last hundred years the
painter seems to have neglected nothing except to learn how to paint.
For more than a hundred years painting has been in service. She has
acted as a sort of handmaiden to literature, her mission being to make
clear to the casual and the unlettered what the lettered had already
understood and enjoyed in a more subtle and more erudite form. But to
pass from the abstract to the concrete, and, so far as regards
subject, to make my meaning quite clear to every one, I cannot do
better than to ask my readers to recall Mr. Luke Fildes' picture of
"The Doctor". No better example could be selected of a picture in
which the subject is the supreme interest. True that Mr. Fildes has
not taken his subject from novel or poem; in this picture he may have
been said to have been his own librettist, and perhaps for that very
reason the subject is the one preponderating interest in the picture.
He who doubts if this be so has only to ask himself if any critic
thought of pointing to any special passage of colour in this picture,
of calling attention to the quality of the modelling or the ability of
the drawing. No; what attracted attention was the story. Would the
child live or die? Did that dear, good doctor entertain any hopes of
the poor little thing's recovery? And the poor parents, how grieved
they seemed! Perhaps it is their only child. The picture is typical of
contemporary art, which is nearly all conceived in the same spirit,
and can therefore have no enduring value. And if by chance the English
artist does occasionally escape from the vice of subject for subject's
sake, he almost invariably slips into what I may called the derivative
vices--exactness of costume, truth of effect and local colour. To
explain myself on this point, I will ask the reader to recall any one
of Mr. Alma Tadema's pictures; it matters not a jot which is chosen.
That one, for instance, where, in a circular recess of white marble,
Sappho reads to a Greek poet, or is it the young man who is reading to
Sappho and her maidens? The interest of the picture is purely
archaeological. According to the very latest researches, the ornament
which Greek women wore in their hair was of such a shape, and Mr.
Tadema has reproduced the shape in his picture. Further researches are
made, and it is discovered that that ornament was not worn until a
hundred years later. The picture is therefore deprived of some of its
interest, and the researches of the next ten years may make it appear
as old-fashioned as the Greek pictures of the last two generations
appear in our eyes to-day. Until then it is as interesting as a page
of Smith's _Classical Dictionary_. We look at it and we say, "How
curious! And that was how the Greeks washed and dressed themselves!"
When Mr. Holman Hunt conceived the idea of a picture of Christ earning
His livelihood by the sweat of His brow, it seemed to him to be quite
necessary to go to Jerusalem. There he copied a carpenter's shop from
nature, and he filled it with Arab tools and implements, feeling sure
that, the manners and customs having changed but little in the East,
it was to be surmised that such tools and implements must be nearly
identical with those used eighteen centuries ago. To dress the Virgin
in sumptuous flowing robes, as Raphael did, was clearly incorrect; the
Virgin was a poor woman, and could not have worn more than a single
garment, and the garment she wore probably resembled the dress of the
Arab women of the present day, and so on and so on. Through the window
we see the very landscape that Christ looked upon. From the point of
view of the art critic of the _Daily Telegraph_ nothing could be
better; the various sites and prospects are explained and commented
upon, and the heart of middle-class England beats in sympathetic
response. But the real picture-lover sees nothing save two
geometrically drawn figures placed in the canvas like diagrams in a
book of Euclid. And the picture being barren of artistic interest, his
attention is caught by the Virgin's costume, and the catalogue informs
him that Mr. Hunt's model was an Arab woman in Jerusalem, whose dress
in all probability resembled the dress the Virgin wore two thousand
years ago. The carpenter's shop he is assured is most probably an
exact counterpart of the carpenter's shop in which Christ worked. How
very curious! how very curious!
Curiosity in art has always been a corruptive influence, and the art
of our century is literally putrid with curiosity. Perhaps the desire
of home was never so fixed and so real in any race as some would have
us believe. At all times there have been men whose feet itched for
travel; even in Holland, the country above all others which gave
currency to the belief in the stay-at-home instinct, there were always
adventurous spirits who yearned for strange skies and lands. It was
this desire of travel that destroyed the art of Holland in the
seventeenth century. I can hardly imagine an article that would be
more instructive and valuable than one dealing precisely with those
Dutchmen who went to Italy in quest of romance, poetry, and general
artistic culture, for travel has often had an injurious effect on art.
I do not say foreign travel, I say any travel. The length of the
journey counts for nothing, once the painter's inspiration springs
from the novelty of the colour, or the character of the landscape, or
the interest that a strange costume suggests. There are painters who
have never been further than Maidenhead, and who bring back what I
should call _notes de voyage_; there are others who have travelled
round the world and have produced general aspects bearing neither
stamp nor certificate of mileage--in other words, pictures. There are,
therefore, two men who must not be confused one with the other, the
traveller that paints and the painter that travels.
Every day we hear of a painter who has been to Norway, or to Brittany,
or to Wales, or to Algeria, and has come back with sixty-five
sketches, which are now on view, let us say, at Messrs. Dowdeswell's
Galleries, in New Bond Street, the home of all such exhibitions. The
painter has been impressed by the savagery of fiords, by the
prettiness of blouses and sabots, by the blue mountain in the distance
and the purple mountain in the foreground, by the narrow shade of the
street, and the solemnity of a _burnous_ or the grace of a _haik_
floating in the wind. The painter brings back these sights and scenes
as a child brings back shells from the shore--they seemed very strange
and curious, and, therefore, like the child, he brought back, not the
things themselves, but the next best things, the most faithful
sketches he could make of them. To understand how impossible it is to
paint _pictures_ in a foreign country, we have only to imagine a young
English painter setting up his easel in, let us say, Algeria. There he
finds himself confrontedwith a new world; everything is different: the
costumes are strange, the rhythm of the lines is different, the
effects are harsh and unknown to him; at home the earth is dark and
the sky is light, in Algeria the everlasting blue must be darker than
the white earth, and the key of colour widely different from anything
he has seen before. Selection is impossible, he cannot distinguish
between the important and the unimportant; everything strikes him with
equal vividness. To change anything of this country, so clear, so
precise, so characteristic, is to soften; to alleviate what is too
rude, is to weaken; to generalise, is to disfigure. So the artist is
obliged to take Algiers in the lump; in spite of himself he will find
himself forced into a scrupulous exactitude, nothing must be passed
over, and so his pictures are at best only the truth, photographic
truth and the naturalness of a fac-simile.
The sixty-five drawings which the painter will bring back and will
exhibit in Messrs. Dowdeswell's will be documentary evidence of the
existence of Algeria--of all that makes a country itself, of exactly
the things by which those who have been there know it, of the things
which will make it known to those who have not been there, the exact
type of the inhabitants, their costume, their attitudes, their ways,
and manner of living. Once the painter accepts truth for aim and end,
it becomes impossible to set a limit upon his investigations. We shall
learn how this people dress, ride, and hunt; we shall learn what arms
they use--the painter will describe them as well as a pencil may
describe--the harness of the horses he must know and understand;
through dealing with so much novelty it becomes obligatory for the
travelling painter to become explanatory and categorical. And as the
attraction of the unknown corresponds in most people to the immoral
instinct of curiosity, the painter will find himself forced to attempt
to do with paint and canvas what he could do much better in a written
account. His public will demand pictures composed after the manner of
an inventory, and the taste for ethnography will end by being confused
with the sentiment of beauty.
Amongst this collection of _documents_ which causes the Gallery to
resound with foolish and vapid chatter there are two small pictures.
Every one has passed by them, but now an artist is examining them, and
they are evidently the only two things in the exhibition that interest
him. One is entitled "Sunset on the Nile", an impression of the
melancholy of evening; the other is entitled "Pilgrims", a band of
travellers passing up a sandy tract, an impression of hot desert
solitudes.
And now I will conclude with an anecdote taken from one to whom I owe
much. Two painters were painting on the banks of the Seine. Suddenly a
shepherd passed driving before him a long flock of sheep, silhouetting
with supple movement upon the water whitening under a grey sky at the
end of April. The shepherd had his scrip on his back, he wore the
great felt hat and the gaiters of the herdsman, two black dogs,
picturesque in form, trotted at his heels, for the flock was going in
excellent order. "Do you know," cried one painter to the other, "that
nothing is more interesting to paint than a shepherd on the banks of
_a river_?" He did not say the Seine--he said a river.