Is the introduction of the subject into art the one and only cause for
the defeat of the brilliant genius which the Revolution and the
victories of Napoleoncalled into existence? Are there not other modern
and special signs which distinguish the nineteenth century French
schools from all the schools that preceded it? I think there are.
Throwing ourselves back in our chairs, let us think of this French
school in its _ensemble_. What extraordinary variety! What an absence
of fixed principle! curiosity, fever, impatience, hurry, anxiety,
desire touching on hysteria. An enormous expenditure of force, but
spent in so many different and contrary directions, that the sum-total
of the result seems a little less than we had expected. Throwing
ourselves back in our chairs, and closing our eyes a second time, let
us think of our eighteenth century English school. Is it not like
passing from the glare and vicarious holloaing of the street into a
quiet, grave assembly of well-bred men, who are not afraid to let each
other speak, and know how to make themselves heard without shouting;
men who choose their words so well that they afford to speak without
emphasis, and in whose speech you find neither neologisms, nor
inversions, nor grammatical extravagances, nor calculated brutalities,
nor affected ignorance, nor any faintest trace of pedantry? What these
men have to say is more or less interesting, but they address us in
the same language, and however arbitrarily we may place them, though
we hang a pig-stye by Morland next to a duchess by Gainsborough, we
are surprised by a pleasant air of family likeness in the execution.
We feel, however differently these men see and think, that they are
content to express themselves in the same language. Their work may be
compared to various pieces of music played on an instrument which was
common property; they were satisfied with the instrument, and
preferred to compose new music for it than to experiment with the
instrument itself.
It may be argued that in the lapse of a hundred years the numerous
differences of method which characterise modern painting will
disappear, and that it will seem as uniform to the eyes of the
twenty-first century as the painting of the eighteenth century seems
in our eyes to-day. I do not think this will be so. And in proof of
this opinion I will refer again to the differences of opinion
regarding the first principles of painting and drawing which divided
Ingres and Géricault. Differences regarding first principles never
existed between the leaders of any other artistic movement. Not
between Michael Angelo and Raphael, not between Veronese, Tintoretto,
Titian, and Rubens; not between Hals or any other Dutchman, except
Rembrandt, born between 1600 and 1640; or between Van Dyck and
Reynolds and Gainsborough. Nor must the difference between the methods
of Giotto and Titian cause any one to misunderstand my meaning. The
change that two centuries brought into art was a gradual change,
corresponding exactly to the ideas which the painter wished to
express; each method was sufficient to explain the ideas current at
the time it was invented for that purpose; it served that purpose and
no more.
Facilities for foreign travel, international exhibitions, and
cosmopolitanism have helped to keep artists of all countries in a
ferment of uncertainty regarding even the first principles of their
art. But this is not all; education has proved a vigorous and rapid
solvent, and has completed the disintegration of art. A young man goes
to the Beaux Arts; he is taught how to measure the model with his
pencil, and how to determine the movement of the model with his
plumb-line. He is taught how to draw by the masses rather than by the
character, and the advantages of this teaching permit him, if he is an
intelligent fellow, to produce at the end of two years' hard labour a
measured, angular, constipated drawing, a sort of inferior photograph.
He is then set to painting, and the instruction he receives amounts to
this--that he must not rub the paint about with his brush as he rubbed
the chalk with his paper stump. After a long methodical study of the
model, an attempt is made to prepare a corresponding tone; no medium
must be used; and when the, large square brush is filled full of
sticky, clogging pigment it is drawn half an inch down and then half
an inch across the canvas, and the painter must calculate how much he
can finish at a sitting, for this system does not admit of
retouchings. It is practised in all the French studios, where it is
known as _la peinture au premier coup_.
A clever young man, a man of talent, labours at art in the manner I
have described from eight to ten hours a day, and at the end of six or
seven years his education is completed. During the long while of his
pupilage he has heard, "first learn your trade, and then do what you
like". The time has arrived for him to do what he likes. He already
suspects that the mere imitation of MM. Bouguereau and Lefebvre will
bring him neither fame nor money; he soon finds that is so, and it
becomes clear to him he must do something different. Enticing vistas
of possibilities open out before him, but he is like a man whose limbs
have been kept too long in splints--they are frozen; and he at length
understands the old and terrible truth: as the twig is bent so will it
grow. The skin he would slough will not be sloughed; he tries all the
methods--robust executions, lymphatic executions, sentimental and
insipid executions, painstaking executions, cursive and impertinent
executions. Through all these the Beaux Arts student, if he is
intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his
primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without
ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he
is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries.
Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects
learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of
ignorance, equally unreal--a mild, sophisticated ignorance, which he
calls _naïveté_. And these various execution she is never more than
superficially acquainted with; he does not practise any one long
enough to extract what good there may be in it.
To set before the reader the full story of the French decadence, I
should have to relate the story of the great schism of some few years
ago, when the pedants remained at the _Salon_ under the headship of
Mr. Bouguereau, and the experimentalists followed Meissonier to the
Champs de Mars.[Footnote: See "Impressions and Opinions."]The
authoritative name of Meissonier, the genius of Puvis de Chavannes,
and the interest of the exhibition of Stevens' early work, sufficed
for some years to disguise the progress and the tendency of the
declension of French art; and it was not until last year (1892) that
it was impossible to doubt any longer that the great French
renaissance of the beginning of the century had worn itself out, that
the last leaves were falling, and that probably a long period of
winter rest was preparing. French art has resolved itself into pedants
and experimentalists! The _Salon_ is now like to a library of Latin
verses composed by the Eton and Harrow masters and their pupils; the
Champs de Mars like a costume ball at Elyseé Montmartre.
In England it is customary for art to enter by a side door, and the
enormous subvention to the Kensington Schools would never have been
voted by Parliament if the bill had not been gilt with the usual
utility gilding. It was represented that the schools were intended for
something much more serious than the mere painting of pictures, which
only rich people could buy: the schools were primarily intended as
schools of design, wherein the sons and daughters of the people would
be taught how to design wall-papers, patterns for lace, curtains,
damask table-cloths, etc. The intention, like many another, was
excellent; but the fact remains that, except for examination purposes,
the work done by Kensington students is useless. A design for a piece
of wall-paper, for which a Kensington student is awarded a medal, is
almost sure to prove abortive when put to a practical test. The
isolated pattern looks pretty enough on the two feet of white paper on
which it is drawn; but when the pattern is manifolded, it is usually
found that the designer has not taken into account the effect of the
repetition. That is the pitfall into which the Kensington student
usually falls; he cannot make practical application of his knowledge,
and at Minton's factory all the designs drawn by Kensington students
have to be redrawn by those who understand the practical working out
of the processes of reproduction and the quality of the material
employed. So complete is the failure of the Kensington student, that
to plead a Kensington education is considered to be an almost fatal
objection against any one applying for work in any of our industrial
centres.
Five-and-twenty years ago the schools of art at South Kensington were
the most comical in the world; they were the most complete parody on
the Continental school of art possible to imagine. They are no doubt
the same to-day as they were five-and-twenty years ago--any way, the
educational result is the same. The schools as I remember them were
faultless in everything except the instruction dispensed there. There
were noble staircases, the floors were covered with cocoa-nut matting,
the rooms admirably heated with hot-water pipes, there were plaster
casts and officials. In the first room the students practised drawing
from the flat. Engraved outlines of elaborate ornamentation were given
them, and these they drew with lead pencil, measuring the spaces
carefully with compasses. In about six months or a year the student
had learned to use his compass correctly, and to produce a fine hard
black-lead outline; the harder and finer the outline, the more the
drawing looked like a problem in a book of Euclid, the better the
examiner was pleased, and the more willing was he to send the student
to the room upstairs, where drawing was practised from the antique.
This was the room in which the wisdom of South Kensington attained a
complete efflorescence. I shall never forget the scenes I witnessed
there. Having made choice of a cast, the student proceeded to measure
the number of heads; he then measured the cast in every direction, and
ascertained by means of a plumb-line exactly where the lines fell. It
wasmore like land-surveying than drawing, and to accomplish this
portion of his task took generally a fortnight, working six hours a
week. He then placed a sheet of tissue paper upon his drawing, leaving
only one small part uncovered, and, having reduced his chalk pencil to
the finest possible point, he proceeded to lay in a set of extremely
fine lines. These were crossed by a second set of lines, and the two
sets of lines were elaborately stippled, every black spot being
carefully picked out with bread. With a patience truly sublime in its
folly, he continued the process all the way down the figure,
accomplishing, if he were truly industrious, about an inch square in
the course of an evening. Our admiration was generally directed to
those who had spent the longest time on their drawings. After three
months' work a student began to be noticed; at the end of four he
became an important personage. I remember one who had contrived to
spend six months on his drawing. He was a sort of demigod, and we used
to watch him anxious and alarmed lest he might not have the genius to
devote still another month to it, and our enthusiasm knew no bounds
when we learned that, a week before the drawings had to be sent in, he
had taken his drawing home and spent three whole days stippling it and
picking out the black spots with bread.
The poor drawing had neither character nor consistency; it looked like
nothing under the sun, except a drawing done at Kensington--a flat,
foolish thing, but very soft and smooth. But this was enough; it was
passed by the examiners, and the student went into the Life Room to
copy an Italian model as he had copied the Apollo Belvedere. Once or
twice a week a gentleman who painted tenth-rate pictures, which were
not always hung in the Academy, came round and passed casual remarks
on the quality of the stippling. There was a head-master who painted
tenth-rate historical pictures, after the manner of a tenth-rate
German painter in a provincial town, in a vast studio upstairs, which
the State was good enough to provide him with, and he occasionally
walked through the studios; on an average, I should say, once a month.
The desire to organise art proceeded in France from a love of system,
and in England from a love of respectability. To the ordinary mind
there is something especially reassuring in medals, crowns,
examinations, professors, and titles; and since the founding of the
Kensington Schools we unfortunately hear no more of parents opposing
their children's wishes to become artists. The result of all these
facilities for art study has been to swamp natural genius and to
produce enormous quantities of vacuous little water colours and slimy
little oil colours. Young men have been prevented from going to
Australia and Canada and becoming rough farmers, and young ladies from
following them and becoming rough wives and themothers of healthy
children. Instead of such natural emigration and extension of the
race, febrile little pilgrimages have been organised to Paris and
Grey, whence astonishing methods and theories regarding the
conditions, under which painting alone can be accomplished, have been
brought back. Original Kensington stipple has been crossed with square
brush-work, and the mule has been bred in and in with open brush-work,
and fresh strains have been sought in the execution at the angle of
forty-five; art has become infinitely hybrid and definitely sterile.
Must we then conclude that all education is an evil? Why exaggerate;
why outstrip the plain telling of the facts? For those who are
thinking of adopting art as a profession it is sufficient to know that
the one irreparable evil is a bad primary education. Be sure that
after five years of the Beaux Arts you cannot become a great painter.
Be sure that after five years of Kensington you can never become a
painter at all. "If not at Kensington nor at the Beaux Arts, where am
I to obtain the education I stand in need of?" cries the embarrassed
student. I do not propose to answer that question directly. How the
masters of Holland and Flanders obtained their marvellous education is
not known. We neither know how they learned nor how they painted. Did
the early masters paint first in monochrome, adding the colouring
matter afterwards? Much vain conjecturing has been expended in
attempting to solve this question. Did Ruysdale paint direct from
nature or from drawings? Unfortunately on this question history has no
single word to say. We know that Potter learned his trade in the
fields in lonely communication with nature. We know too that Crome was
a house-painter, and practised painting from nature when his daily
work was done. Nevertheless he attained as perfect a technique as any
painter that ever lived. Morland, too, was self-taught: he practised
painting in the fields and farmyards and the country inns where he
lived, oftentimes paying for board and lodging with a picture. Did his
art suffer from want of education? Is there any one who believes that
Morland would have done better work if he had spent three or four
years stippling drawings from the antique at South Kensington?
I will conclude these remarks, far too cursive and incomplete, with an
anecdote which, I think, will cause the thoughtful to ponder. Some
seven or eight years ago, Renoir, a painter of rare talent and
originality, after twenty years of struggle with himself and poverty,
succeeded in attaining a very distinct and personal expression of his
individuality. Out of a hundred influences he had succeeded in
extracting an art as beautiful as it was new. His work was beginning
to attract buyers. For the first time in his life he had a little
money in hand, and he thought he would like a holiday. Long reading of
novels leads the reader to suppose that he found his ruin in a period
of riotous living, the reaction induced by anxiety and over-work. Not
at all. He did what every wise friend would have advised him to do
under the circumstances: he went to Venice to study Tintoretto. The
magnificences of this master struck him through with the sense of his
own insignificance; he became aware of the fact that he could not draw
like Tintoretto; and when he returned to Paris he resolved to subject
himself to two years of hard study in an art school. For two years he
laboured in the life class, working on an average from seven to ten
hours a day, and in two years he had utterly destroyed every trace of
the charming and delightful art which had taken him twenty years to
build up. I know of no more tragic story--do you?