That nearly all artists dislike and despise the Royal Academy is a
matter of common knowledge. Whether with reason or without is a matter
of opinion, but the existence of an immense fund of hate and contempt
of the Academy is not denied. From Glasgow to Cornwall, wherever a
group of artists collects, there hangs a gathering and a darkening sky
of hate. True, the position of the Academy seems to be impregnable;
and even if these clouds should break into storm the Academy would be
as little affected as the rock of Gibraltar by squall or tempest. The
Academy has successfully resisted a Royal Commission, and a crusade
led by Mr. Holman Hunt in the columns of the _Times_ did not succeed
in obtaining the slightest measure of reform.... Here I might consult
Blue-books and official documents, and tell the history of the
Academy; but for the purpose of this article the elementary facts in
every one's possession are all that are necessary. We know that we owe
the Academy to the artistic instincts of George III. It was he who
sheltered it in Somerset House, and when Somerset House was turned
into public offices, the Academy was bidden to Trafalgar Square; and
when circumstances again compelled the authorities to ask the Academy
to move on, the Academy, posing as a public body, demanded a site, and
the Academy was given one worth three hundred thousand pounds. Thereon
the Academy erected its present buildings, and when they were
completed the Academy declared itself on the first opportunity to be
no public body at all, but a private enterprise. Then why the site,
and why the Royal charter? Mr. Colman, Mr. Pears, Mr. Reckitt are not
given sites worth three hundred thousand pounds. These questions have
often been asked, and to them the Academy has always an excellent
answer. "The site has been granted, and we have erected buildings upon
it worth a hundred thousand pounds; get rid of us you cannot."
The position of the Academy is as impregnable as the rock of
Gibraltar; it is as well advertised as the throne itself, and the
income derived from the sale of the catalogues alone is enormous. Then
the Academy has the handling of the Chantrey Bequest Funds, which it
does not fail to turn to its own advantage by buying pictures of
Academicians, which do not sell in the open market, at extravagant
prices, or purchasing pictures by future Academicians, and so
fostering, strengthening, and imposing on the public the standard of
art which obtains in Academic circles. Such, in a few brief words, is
the institution which controls and in a large measure directs the art
of this country. But though I come with no project to obtain its
dissolution, it seems to me interesting to consider the causes of the
hatred of the Academy with which artistic England is saturated,
oftentimes convulsed; and it may be well to ask if any institution,
however impregnable, can continue to defy public opinion, if any
sovereignty, however fortified by wealth and buttressed by
prescription, can continue to ignore and outrage the opinions of its
subjects?
The hatred of artistic England for the Academy proceeds from the
knowledge that the Academy is no true centre of art, but a mere
commercial enterprise protected and subventioned by Government. In
recent years every shred of disguise has been cast off, and it has
become patent to every one that the Academy is conducted on as purely
commercial principles as any shop in the Tottenham Court Road. For it
is impossible to suppose that Mr. Orchardson and Mr. Watts do not know
that Mr. Leader's landscapes are like tea-trays, that Mr. Dicksee's
figures are like bon-bon boxes, and that Mr. Herkomer's portraits are
like German cigars. But apparently the R.A.'s are merely concerned to
follow the market, and they elect the men whose pictures sell best in
the City. City men buy the productions of Mr. Herkomer, Mr. Dicksee,
Mr. Leader, and Mr. Goodall. Little harm would be done to art if the
money thus expended meant no more than filling stockbrokers'
drawing-rooms with bad pictures, but the uncontrolled exercise of the
stockbroker's taste in art means the election of a vast number of
painters to the Academy, and election to the Academy means certain
affixes, R.A. and A., and these signs are meant to direct opinion.
For when the ordinary visitor thinks a picture very bad, and finds
R.A. or A. after the painter's name, he concludes that he must be
mistaken, and so a false standard of art is created in the public
mind. But though Mr. Orchardson, Sir John Millais, Sir Frederick
Leighton, and Mr. Watts have voted for the City merchants' nominees,
it would be a mistake to suppose that they did not know for whom they
should have voted. It is to be questioned if there be an R. A. now
alive who would dare to deny that Mr. Whistler is a very great
painter. It was easy to say he was not in the old days when, under the
protection of Mr. Ruskin, the R.A.s went in a body and gave evidence
against him. But now even Mr. Jones, R.A., would not venture to repeat
the opinion he expressed about one of the most beautiful of the
nocturnes. Time, it is true, has silenced the foolish mouth of the
R.A., but time has not otherwise altered him; and there is as little
chance to-day as there was twenty years ago of Mr. Whistler being
elected an Academician.
No difference exists even in Academic circles as to the merits of Mr.
Albert Moore's work. Many Academicians will freely acknowledge that
his non-election is a very grave scandal; they will tell you that they
have done everything to get him elected, and have given up the task in
despair. Mr. Whistler and Mr. Albert Moore, the two greatest artists
living in England, will never be elected Academicians; and artistic
England is asked to acquiesce in this grave scandal, and also in many
minor scandals: the election of Mr. Dicksee in place of Mr. Henry
Moore, and Mr. Stanhope Forbes in place of Mr. Swan or Mr. John
Sargent! No one thinks Mr. Dicksee as capable an artist as Mr. Henry
Moore, and no one thinks Mr. Stanhope Forbes as great an artist as Mr.
Swan or Mr. Sargent. Then why were they elected? Because the men who
represent most emphatically the taste of the City have become so
numerous of late years in the Academy that they are able to keep out
any one whose genius would throw a doubt on the commonplace ideal
which they are interested in upholding. Mr. Alma Tadema would not care
to confer such a mark of esteem as the affix R.A. on any painter
practising an art which, when understood, would involve hatred of the
copyplate antiquity which he supplies to the public.
This explanation seems incredible, I admit, but no other explanation
is possible, for I repeat that the Academicians do not themselves deny
the genius of the men they have chosen to ignore. So we find the
Academy as a body working on exactly the same lines as the individual
R.A., whose one ambition is to extend his connection, please his
customers, and frustrate competition; and just as the capacity of the
individual R.A. declines when the incentive is money, so does the
corporate body lose its strength, and its hold on the art instincts of
the nation relaxes when its aim becomes merely mercenary enterprise.
If Sir John Millais, Sir Frederick Leighton, Mr. Orchardson, Mr. Hook,
and Mr. Watts were to die tomorrow, their places could be filled by
men who are not and never will be in the Academy; but among the
Associates there is no name that does not suggest a long decline: Mr.
Macbeth, Mr. Leader, Mr. David Murray, Mr. Stanhope Forbes, Mr. J.
MacWhirter. And are the coming Associates Mr. Hacker, Mr. Shannon, Mr.
Solomon, Mr. Alfred East, Mr. Bramley? Mr. Swan has been passed over
so many times that his election is beginning to seem doubtful. For
very shame's sake the elder Academicians may bring their influence and
insist on his election; but the City merchants' nominees are very
strong, and will not have him if they can help it. They may yield to
Mr. Swan, but no single inch further will it be possible to get them
to go. Mr. Mouat Loudan, Mr. Lavery, Mr. Mark Fisher, and Mr.
Peppercorn have no chance soever. Mr. Mouat Loudan, was rejected this
year. Mr. Lavery's charming portrait of Lord McLaren's daughters was
still more shamefully treated; it was "skied". Mr. Mark Fisher, most
certainly our greatest living landscape-painter, had his picture
refused; and Mr. Reid, a man who has received medals in every capital
in Europe, has had his principal picture hung just under the ceiling.
On varnishing-day Mr. Reid challenged Mr. Dicksee to give a reason for
this disgraceful hanging; he defied him to say that he thought the
pictures underneath were better pictures; and it is as impossible for
me as it was for Mr. Dicksee to deny that Mr. Reid's picture is the
best picture in Room 6. Mr. Peppercorn, another well-known artist, had
his picture rejected. It is now hanging in the Goupil Galleries. I do
not put it forward as a masterpiece, but I do say that it deserved a
place in any exhibition, and if I had a friend on the Hanging
Committee I would ask him to point to the landscapes on the Academy
walls which he considers better than Mr. Peppercorn's.
Often a reactionary says, "Name the good pictures that have been
rejected; where can I see them? I want to see these masterpieces,"
etc. The reactionary has generally the best of the argument. It is
difficult to name the pictures that have been refused; they are the
unknown quantity. Moreover, the pictures that are usually refused are
tentative efforts, and not mature work. But this year the opponents of
the Academy are able to cite some very substantial facts in support of
their position, a portrait by our most promising portrait-painter and
a landscape by the best landscape-painter alive in England having been
rejected. The picture of the farm-yard which Mr. Fisher exhibited at
the New English Art Club last autumn would not be out of place in the
National Gallery. I do not say that the rejected picture is as good--I
have not seen the rejected picture--but I do say that Mr. Fisher could
not paint as badly as nine-tenths of the landscapes hanging in the
Academy if he tried.
The Academy is sinking steadily; never was it lower than this year;
next year a few fine works may crop up, but they will be accidents,
and will not affect the general tendency of the exhibitions nor the
direction in which the Academy is striving to lead English art. Under
the guidanceship of the Academy English art has lost all that charming
naïveté and simplicity which was so long its distinguishing mark. At
an Academy banquet, anything but the most genial optimism would be out
of place, and yet Sir Frederick Leighton could not but allude to the
disintegrating influence of French art. True, in the second part of
the sentence he assured his listeners that the danger was more
imaginary than real, and he hoped that with wider knowledge, etc. But
if no danger need be apprehended, why did Sir Frederick trouble to
raise the question? And if he apprehended danger and would save us
from it, why did he choose to ask his friend M. Bouguereau to exhibit
at the Academy?
The allusion in Sir Frederick's speech to French methods, and the
exhibition of a picture by M. Bouguereau in the Academy, is strangely
significant. For is not M. Bouguereau the chief exponent of the art
which Sir Frederick ventures to suggest may prove a disintegrating
influence in our art?--has proven would be a more correct phrase. Let
him who doubts compare the work of almost any of the elder
Academicians with the work of those who practise the square brushwork
of the French school. Compare, for instance, Sir Frederick's "Garden
of the Hesperides" with Mr. Solomon's "Orpheus", and then you will
appreciate the gulf that separates the elder Academicians from the men
already chosen and marked out for future Academicians. And him whom
this illustration does not convince I will ask to compare Mr. Hacker's
"Annunciation" with any picture by Mr. Frith, or Mr. Faed, I will even
go so far as to say with any work by Mr. Sidney Cooper, an
octogenarian, now nearer his ninetieth than his eightieth year.
It would have been better if Sir Frederick had told the truth boldly
at the Academy banquet. He knows that a hundred years will hardly
suffice to repair the mischief done by this detestable French
painting, this mechanical drawing and modelling, built up
systematically, and into which nothing of the artist's sensibility may
enter. Sir Frederick hinted the truth, and I do not think it will
displease him that I should say boldly what he was minded but did not
dare to say. The high position he occupies did not allow him to go
further than he did; the society of which he is president is now
irreparably committed to Anglo-French art, and has, by every recent
election, bound itself to uphold and impose this false and foreign art
upon the nation.
Out of the vast array of portraits and subject-pictures painted in
various styles and illustrating every degree of ignorance, stupidity,
and false education, one thing really comes home to the careful
observer, and that is, the steady obliteration of all English feeling
and mode of thought. The younger men practise an art purged of all
nationality. England lingers in the elder painters, and though the
representation is often inadequate, the English pictures are
pleasanter than the mechanical art which has spread from Paris all
over Europe, blotting out in its progress all artistic expression of
racial instincts and mental characteristics. Nothing, for instance,
can be more primitive, more infantile in execution, than Mr. Leslie's
"Rose Queen". But it seems to me superficial criticism to pull it to
pieces, for after all it suggests a pleasant scene, a stairway full of
girls in white muslin; and who does not like pretty girls dressed in
white muslin? And Mr. Leslie spares us the boredom of odious and
sterile French pedantry.
Mr. Waterhouse's picture of "Circe Poisoning the Sea" is an excellent
example of professional French painting. The drawing is planned out
geometrically, the modelling is built up mechanically. The brush,
filled with thick paint, works like a trowel. In the hands of the
Dutch and Flemish artists the brush was in direct communication with
the brain, and moved slowly or rapidly, changing from the broadest and
most emphatic stroke to the most delicate and fluent touch according
to the nature of the work. But here all is square and heavy. The
colour scheme, the blue dress and the green water--how theatrical, how
its richness reeks of the French studio! How cosmopolitan and pedantic
is this would-be romantic work!
But can we credit Mr. Dicksee with any artistic intention in the
picture he calls "Leila", hanging in the next room? I think not. Mr.
Dicksee probably thought that having painted what the critics would
call "somewhat sad subjects" last year, it would be well if he painted
something distinctly gay this year. A girl in a harem struck him as a
subject that would please every one, especially if he gave her a
pretty face, a pretty dress, and posed her in a graceful attitude. A
nice bright crimson was just the colour for the dress, the feet he
might leave bare, and it would be well to draw them from the plaster
cast--a pair of pretty feet would be sure to find favour with the
populace. It is impossible to believe that Mr. Dicksee was moved by
any deeper thought or impression when he painted this picture. The
execution is not quite so childlike and bland as Mr. Leslie's; it is
heavier and more stodgy. One is a cane chair from the Tottenham Court
Road, the other is a dining-room chair from the Tottenham Court Road.
In neither does any trace of French influence appear, and both
painters are City-elected Academicians.
A sudden thought.... Leader, Fildes, David Murray, Peter Graham,
Herkomer.... Then it is not the City that favours the French school,
but the Academy itself! And this shows how widely tastes may differ,
yet remain equally sundered from good taste. I believe the north and
the south poles are equidistant from the equator. Looking at Sir
Frederick Leighton's picture, entitled "At the Fountain", I am forced
to admit that, regarded as mere execution, it is quite as intolerably
bad as Mr. Dicksee's "Leila". And yet it is not so bad a picture,
because Sir Frederick's mind is a higher and better-educated mind than
Mr. Dicksee's; and therefore, however his hand may fail him, there
remains a certain habit of thought which always, even when worn and
frayed, preserves something of its original aristocracy. "The Sea
giving up its Dead" is an unpleasant memory of Michael Angelo. But in
"The Garden of the Hesperides" Sir Frederick is himself, and nothing
but himself. And the picture is so incontestably the work of an artist
that I cannot bring myself to inquire too closely into its
shortcomings. The merit of the picture is in the arabesque, which is
charming and original. The maidens are not dancing, but sitting round
their tree. On the right there is an olive, in the middle the usual
strawberry-cream, and on the left a purple drapery. The brown water in
the foreground balances the white sky most happily, and the faces of
the women recall our best recollections of Sir Frederick's work. In
the next room--Room 3--Mr. Watts exhibits a very incoherent work
entitled "She shall be called Woman".
The subject on which all of us are most nearly agreed--painters'
critics and the general public--is the very great talent of Mr. G. F.
Watts. Even the Chelsea studios unite in praising him. But were we
ever sincere in our praise of him as we are sincere in our praise of
Degas, Whistler, and Manet? And lately have we not begun to suspect
our praise to-day is a mere clinging to youthful admirations which
have no root in our present knowledge and aestheticisms? Perhaps the
time has come to say what we do really think of Mr. Watts. We think
that his very earliest pictures show, occasionally, the hand of a
painter; but for the last thirty years Mr. Watts seems to have been
undergoing transformation, and we see him now as a sort of cross
between an alchemist of old time and a book collector--his left hand
fumbling among the reds and blues of the old masters, his right
turning the pages of a dusty folio in search of texts for
illustration; a sort of a modern Veronese in treacle and gingerbread.
To judge him by what he exhibits this year would not be just. We will
select for criticism the celebrated portrait of Mrs. Percy Wyndham--in
which he has obviously tried to realise all his artistic ideals.
The first thing that strikes me on looking on this picture is the too
obvious intention of the painter to invent something that could not go
out of fashion. On sitting down to paint this picture the painter's
mind seems to have been disturbed with all sorts of undetermined
notions concerning the eternal Beautiful, and the formula discovered
by the Venetian for its complete presentation. "The Venetians gave us
the eternal Beautiful as civilisation presents it. Why not select in
modern life all that corresponds to the Venetian formulae; why not
profit by their experience in the selection I am called upon to make?"
So do I imagine the painter's desire, and certainly the picture is
from end to end its manifestation. Laurel leaves form a background for
the head, and a large flower-vase is in the right-hand corner, and a
balustrade is on the right; and this Anglo-Venetian lady is attired in
a rich robe, brown, with green shades, and heavily embroidered; her
elbow is leaned on a pedestal in a manner that shows off the
plenitudes of the forearm, and for pensive dignity the hand is raised
to the face. It is a noble portrait, and tells the story of a lifelong
devotion to art, and yet it is difficult to escape from the suspicion
that we are not very much interested, and that we find its compound
beauty a little insipid. In avoiding the fashion of his day Mr. Watts
seems to me to have slipped into an abstraction. The mere leaving out
every accent that marks a dress as belonging to a particular epoch
does not save it from going out of fashion. It is in the execution
that the great artists annihilated the whim of temporary taste, and
made the hoops of old time beautiful, however slim the season's
fashions. To be of all time the artist must begin by being of his own
time; and if he would find the eternal type he must seek it in his own
parish.
The painters of old Venice were entirely concerned with _l'idee
plastique_, but on this point the art of Mr. Watts is a repudiation of
the art of his masters. Abstract conceptions have been this long while
a constant source of pollution in his work. Here, even in his
treatment of the complexion, he seems to have been impelled by some
abstract conception rather than by a pictorial sense of harmony and
contrast, and partly for this reason his synthesis is not beautiful,
like the conventional silver-grey which Velasquez used so often, or
the gold-brown skins of Titian's women. The hand tells what was
passing in the mind, and seeing that ugly shadow which marks the nose
I know that the painter was not then engaged with the joy of purely
material creation; had he been he could not have rested satisfied with
so ugly a statement of a beautiful fact. And the forehead, too, where
it comes into light, where it turns into shadow; the cheek, too, with
its jawbone, and the evasive modelling under and below the eyes, are
summarily rendered, and we think perforce of the supple, flowing
modelling, so illusive, apparent only in the result, with which Titian
would have achieved that face. Manet, an incomplete Hals, might have
failed to join the planes, and in his frankness left out what he had
not sufficiently observed; but he would have compensated us with a
beautiful tone.
For an illustration of Mr. Watts' drawing we will take the picture of
"Love and Death", perhaps the most pictorially significant of all Mr.
Watts' designs. The enormous figure of Death advances impressively
with right arm raised to force the door which a terrified Love would
keep closed against him. The figure of Death is draped in grey, the
colour that Mr. Watts is most in sympathy with and manages best. But
the upper portion of the figure is vast, and the construction beneath
the robe too little understood for it not to lack interest; and in the
raised arm and hand laid against the door, where power and delicacy of
line were indispensable for the pictorial beauty of the picture, we
are vouchsafed no more than a rough statement of rudimentary fact.
Love is thrown back against the door, his right arm raised, his right
leg advanced in action of resistance to the intruder. The movement is
well conceived, and we regret that so summary a line should have been
thought sufficient expression. Any one who has ever held a pencil in a
school of art knows how a young body, from armpit to ankle-bone, flows
with lovely line. Any one who has been to the Louvre knows the passion
with which Ingres would follow this line, simplifying it and drawing
it closer until it surpassed all melody. But in Mr. Watts' picture the
boy's natural beauty is lost in a coarse and rough planing out that
tells of an eye that saw vaguely and that wearied, and in an execution
full of uncertain touch and painful effort. Unless the painter is
especially endowed with the instinct of anatomies, the sentiment of
proportion, and a passion for form, the nude is a will-o'-the-wisp,
whose way leads where he may not follow. No one suspects Mr. Watts of
one of these qualifications; he appears even to think them of but
slight value, and his quest of the allegorical seems to be merely
motived by an unfortunate desire to philosophise.
As a colourist Mr. Watts is held in high esteem, and it is as a
colourist that his admirers consider his claim to the future to be
best founded. Beautiful passages of colour are frequently to be met
with in his work, and yet it would be difficult to say what colour
except grey he has shown any mastery over. A painter may paint with an
exceedingly reduced palette, like Chardin, and yet be an exquisite
colourist. To colour well does not consist in the employment of bright
colours, but in the power of carrying the dominant note of colour
through the entire picture, through the shadows as well as the
half-tints, and Chardin's grey we find everywhere, in the bloom of a
peach as well as in a decanter of rich wine; and how tender and
persuasive it is! Mr. Watts' grey would seem coarse, common,
uninteresting beside it. Reds and blues and yellows do not disappear
from Mr. Watts' palette as they do from Rembrandt's; they are there,
but they are usually so dirtied that they appear like a monochrome.
Can we point to any such fresh, beautiful red as the scarf that the
"Princesse des Pays de la Porcelaine" wears about that grey which
would have broken Chardin's heart with envy? Can we point to any blue
in Mr. Watts' as fresh and as beautiful as the blue carpet under the
Princess's feet?
With what Mr. Watts paints it is impossible to say. On one side an
unpleasant reddish brown, scrubbed till it looks like a mud-washed
rock; on the other a crumbling grey, like the rind of a Stilton
cheese. The nude figure in the reeds--the picture purchased for the
Chantrey Fund collection--will serve for illustration. It is clearly
the work of a man with something incontestably great in his soul, but
why should so beautiful a material as oil paint be transformed into a
crumbly substance like--I can think of nothing else but the rind of a
Stilton cheese. Mr. Watts and Mr. Burne-Jones seem to have convinced
themselves that imaginative work can only be expressed in wool-work
and gum. A strange theory, for which I find no authority, even if I
extend my inquiry as far back as Mantegna and Botticelli. True, that
the method of these painters is archaic, the lights are narrowed, and
the shadows broadened; nevertheless, their handling of oil colour is
nearer to Titian's than either Mr. Watts' or Mr. Burne-Jones'.
It is one of the platitudes of art criticism to call attention to the
length of the necks of Rossetti's women, and thereby to infer that the
painter could not draw. True, Rossetti was not a skilful draughtsman,
but not because the necks of his women are too long. The relation
between good drawing and measurement is slight. The first quality in
drawing, without which drawing does not exist, is an individual seeing
of the object. This Rossetti most certainly had; there his
draughtsmanship began and ended. But the question lies rather with
handling than with drawing, and Rossetti sometimes handled paint very
skilfully. The face and hair of the half-length Venus surrounded with
roses is excellent in quality; the roses and the honeysuckle are quite
beautiful in quality; they are fresh and bright, pure in colour, as if
they had just come from the garden. The "Annunciation" in the National
Gallery is a little sandy, but it cannot be said to be bad in quality,
as Mr. Watts' and Mr. Jones' pictures are bad. Every Rossetti is at
least clearly recognisable as an oil painting.
In the same room there is Mr. Orchardson's picture of "Napoleon
dictating the Account of his Campaigns". I gather from my notes the
trace of the disappointment that this picture caused me. "Two small
figures in a large canvas. The secretary sits on the right at a small
table. He looks up, his face turned towards Napoleon, who stands on
the left in the middle of the picture, looking down, studying the maps
with which the floor is strewn. A great simplicity in the
surroundings, and all the points of character insisted on, with the
view of awakening the spectator's curiosity. From first to last a
vicious desire to narrate an anecdote. It is strange that a man of Mr.
Orchardson's talent should participate so fully in the supreme vice of
modern art which believes a picture to be the same thing as a scene in
a play. The whole picture conceived and executed in that pale yellow
tint which seems to be the habitual colour of Mr. Orchardson's mind."
A pity, indeed it is that Mr. Orchardson should waste very real talent
in narratives, for he is a great portrait painter. I remember very
well that beautiful portrait of his wife and child, and will take this
opportunity to recall it. It is the finest thing he has done; finer
than the portrait of Mr. Gilbey. Here, in a few words, is the subject
of the picture. An old-fashioned cane sofa stretches right across the
canvas. A lady in black is seated on the right; she bends forward, her
left arm leaning over the back of the sofa; she holds in her hand a
Japanese hand-screen. The fine and graceful English profile is
modelled without vulgar roundness, _un beau modèle à plat_; and the
black hair is heavy and loose, one lock slipping over the forehead.
The painter has told the exact character of the hair as he has told
the character of the hand, and the age of the hand and hair is
evident. She is a woman of five-and-thirty, she is interested in her
baby, her first baby, as a woman of that age would be. The baby lies
on a woollen rug and cushion, just beneath the mother's eyes; the
colour of both is a reddish yellow. He holds up his hands for the
hand-screen that the mother waves about him. The strip of background
about the yellow cane-work is grey-green; there is a vase of dried
ferns and grasses on the left, and the whole picture is filled and
penetrated with the affection and charm of English home-life, and
without being disfigured with any touch of vulgar or commonplace
sentimentality. The baby's face is somewhat hard; it is, perhaps, the
least satisfactory thing in the picture. The picture is wanting in
that totality which we find in the greatest masters--for instance, in
that exquisite portrait of a mother and child by Sir Joshua Reynolds,
exhibited this year in the Guildhall--that beautiful portrait of the
mother holding out her babe at arms'-length above her knee.
Room 4 is remarkable for Stanhope Forbes' picture of "Forging the
Anchor". Mr. Stanhope Forbes is the last-elected Academician, and the
most prominent exponent of the art of Bastien-Lepage. Perhaps the most
instructive article that could be written on the Academy would be one
in which the writer would confine his examination to this and Mr.
Clausen's picture of "Mowers", comparing and contrasting the two
pictures at every point, showing where they diverge, and tracing their
artistic history back to its ultimate source. But to do this
thoroughly would be to write the history of the artistic movement in
France and England for the last thirty years; and I must limit myself
to pointing out that Mr. Clausen has gone back to first principles,
whereas Mr. Stanhope Forbes still continues at the point where
Bastien-Lepage began to curtail, deform, and degrade the original
inspiration. Mr. Clausen, I said, overcame the difficulty of the
trousers by generalisation. Mr. Stanhope Forbes copied the trousers
seam by seam, patch by patch; and the ugliness of the garment bores
you in the picture, exactly as it would in nature. And the same
criticism applies equally well to the faces, the hands, the leather
aprons, the loose iron, the hammers, the pincers, the smoked walls. I
should not be surprised to learn that Mr. Stanhope Forbes had had a
forge built up in his studio, and had copied it all as it stood. A
handful of dry facts instead of a passionate impression of life in its
envelope of mystery and suggestion.
Realism, that is to say the desire to compete with nature, to be
nature, is the disease from which art has suffered most in the last
twenty years. The disease is now at wane, and when we happen upon a
canvas of the period like "Labourers after Dinner", we cry out, "What
madness! were we ever as mad as that?" The impressionists have been
often accused of a desire to dispense with the element of beauty, but
the accusation has always seemed to me to be quite groundless, and
even memory of a certain portrait by Mr. Walter Sickert does not cause
me to falter in this opinion. Until I saw Mr. Clausen's "Labourers" I
did not fully realise how terrible a thing art becomes when divorced
from beauty, grace, mystery, and suggestion. It would be difficult to
say where and how this picture differs from a photograph; it seems to
me to be little more than the vices of photography magnified. Having
spoken so plainly, it is necessary that I should explain myself.
The subject of this picture is a group of field labourers finishing
their mid-day dinner in the shade of some trees. They are portrayed in
a still even light, exactly as they were; the picture is one long
explanation; it is as clear as a newspaper, and it reads like one. We
can tell how many months that man in the foreground has worn those
dreadful hobnailed boots; we can count the nails, and we notice that
two or three are missing. Those disgusting corduroy trousers have hung
about his legs for so many months; all the ugliness of these
labourers' faces and the solid earthiness of their lives are there;
nothing has been omitted, curtailed, or exaggerated. There is some
psychology. We see that the years have brought the old man cunning
rather than wisdom. The middle-aged man and the middle-aged woman live
in mute stupidity--they have known nothing but the daily hardship of
living, and the vacuous face of their son tells how completely the
life of his forefathers has descended upon him. Here there is neither
the foolish gaiety of Teniers' peasants nor the vicious animality of
Brouwers'; and it is hardly necessary to say that the painter has seen
nothing of the legendary patriarchal beauty and solemnity which lends
so holy a charm to Millet's Breton folk. Mr. Clausen has seen nothing
but the sordid and the mean, and his execution in this picture is as
sordid and as mean as his vision. There is not a noble gesture
expressive of weariness nor an attitude expressive of resignation. Mr.
Clausen seems to have said, "I will go lower than the others; I will
seek my art in the mean and the meaningless." But notwithstanding his
very real talent, Mr. Clausen has not found art where art is not,
where art never has been found, where art never will be found.
Looking at this picture, the ordinary man will say, "If such ugliness
as that exists, I don't want to see it. Why paint such subjects?" And
at least the first part of this criticism seems to me to be quite
incontrovertible. I can imagine no valid reason for the portrayal of
so much ugliness; and, what is more important, I can find among the
unquestioned masters no slightest precedent for the blank realism of
this picture. The ordinary man's aversion to such ugliness seems to me
to be entirely right, and I only join issue with him when he says,
"Why paint such subjects?" Why not? For all subjects contain elements
of beauty; ugliness does not exist for the eye that sees beautifully,
and meanness vanishes if the sensation is a noble one. Have not the
very subjects which Mr. Clausen sees so meanly, and which he degrades
below the level even of the photograph, been seen nobly, and have they
not been rendered incomparably touching, even august, by----Well, the
whole world knows by whom. But it will be said that Mr, Clausen
painted these people as he saw them. I dare say he did; but if he
could not see these field-folk differently, he should have abstained
from painting them.
The mission of art is not truth, but beauty; and I know of no great
work--I will go even further, I know no even tolerable work--in
literature or in painting in which the element of beauty does not
inform the intention. Art is surely but a series of conventions which
enable us to express our special sense of beauty--for beauty is
everywhere, and abounds in subtle manifestations. Things ugly in
themselves become beautiful by association; or perhaps I should say
that they become picturesque. The slightest insistance in a line will
redeem and make artistically interesting the ugliest face. Look at
Degas' ballet-girls, and say if, artistically, they are not beautiful.
I defy you to say that they are mean. Again, an alteration in the
light and shade will create beautiful pictures among the meanest brick
buildings that ever were run up by the jerry-builder. See the violet
suburb stretching into the golden sunset. How exquisite it has become!
how full of suggestion and fairy tale! A picturesque shadow will
redeem the squalor of the meanest garret, and the subdued light of the
little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping must
contrast so delicately with the white glare of the brick yard where
the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the
humble life of the place is transformed and poetised. This was the ABC
of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the
poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace
incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures.
There are no merits in painting except technical merits; and though my
criticism of Mr. Clausen's picture may at first sight seem to be a
literary criticism, it is in truth a strictly technical criticism. For
Mr. Clausen has neglected the admirable lessons which our Dutch
cousins taught us two hundred years ago; he has neglected to avail
himself of those principles of chiaroscuro which they perfected, and
which would have enabled him to redeem the grossness, the ugliness,
the meanness inherent in his subject. I said that he had gone further,
in abject realism, than a photograph. I do not think I have
exaggerated. It is not probable that those peasants would look so ugly
in a photograph as they do in his picture. For had they been
photographed, the chances are that some shadow would have clothed,
would have hid, something, and a chance gleam might have concentrated
the attention on some particular spot. Nine times out of ten the
exposure of the plate would not have taken place in a moment of flat
grey light.
But it is the theory of Mr. Clausen and his school that it is right
and proper to take a six-foot canvas into the open, and paint the
entire picture from Nature. But when the sun is shining, it is not
possible to paint for more than an hour--an hour and a half at most.
At the end of that time the shadows have moved so much that the effect
is wholly different. But on a grey day it is possible to paint on the
same picture for four or five hours. Hence the preference shown by
this school for grey days. Then the whole subject is seen clearly,
like a newspaper; and the artist, if he is a realist, copies every
patch on the trousers, and does not omit to tell us how many nails
have fallen from the great clay-stained boots. Pre-Raphaelitism is
only possible among august and beautiful things, when the subjects of
the pictures are Virgins and angels, and the accessories are marbles,
agate columns, Persian carpets, gold enwoven robes and vestments,
ivories, engraven metals, pearls, velvets and silks, and when the
object of the painter is to convey a sensation of the beauty of these
materials by the luxury and beauty of the workmanship. The common
workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy
breeches and clay-pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses
through a mystery of light and shade.
Beauty of some sort there must be in a work of art, and the very
conditions under which Mr. Clausen painted precluded any beauty from
entering into his picture. But this year Mr. Clausen seems to have
shaken himself free from his early education, and he exhibits a
picture, conceived in an entirely different spirit, in this Academy.
Turning to my notes I find it thus described: "A small canvas
containing three mowers in a flowering meadow. Two are mowing; the
third, a little to the left, sharpens his scythe. The sky is deep and
lowering--a sultry summer day, a little unpleasant in colour, but
true. At the end of the meadow the trees gleam. The earth is wrapped
in a hot mist, the result of the heat, and through it the sun sheds a
somewhat diffused and oven-like heat. There are heavy clouds overhead,
for the gleam that passes over the three white shirts is transitory
and uncertain. The handling is woolly and unpleasant, but handling can
be overlooked when a canvas exhales a deep sensation of life. The
movement of mowing--I should have said movements, for the men mow
differently; one is older than the other--is admirably expressed. And
the principal figure, though placed in the immediate foreground, is in
and not out of the atmosphere. The difficulty of the trousers has been
overcome by generalisation; the garment has not been copied patch by
patch. The distribution of light is admirable; nowhere does it escape
from the frame. J. F. Millet has painted many a worse picture."
Mr. Solomon and Mr. Hacker have both turned to mythology for the
subjects of their pictures. And the beautiful and touching legends of
Orpheus, and the Annunciation, have been treated by them with the
indifference of "our special artist", who places the firemen on the
right, the pump on the left, and the blazing house in the middle of
the picture. These pictures are therefore typical of a great deal of
historical painting of our time; and I speak of them because they give
me an opportunity of pointing out that before deciding to treat a page
of history or legend, the painter should come to conclusions with
himself regarding the goal which he desires to obtain. There are but
two.
Either the legend passes unperceived in pomp of colour and wealth of
design, or the picture is a visible interpretation of the legend. The
Venetians were able to disregard the legend, but in centuries less
richly endowed with pictorial genius painters are inclined to support
their failing art with the psychological interest their imaginations
draw from it. But imaginative interpretation should not be confused
with bald illustration. The Academicians cannot understand why, if we
praise "Dante seeing Beatrice in a Dream", we should vilify Mr.
Fildes' "Doctor". In both cases a story is told, in neither case is
the execution excellent. Why then should one be a picture and the
other no more than a bald illustration? The question is a vexed one,
and the only conclusion that we can draw seems to be that
sentimentality pollutes, the anecdote degrades, wit altogether ruins;
only great thought may enter into art. Rossetti is a painter we
admire, and we place him above Mr. Fildes, because his interpretations
are more imaginative. We condone his lack of pictorial power, because
he could think, and we appreciate his Annunciation--the "Ecce Ancilla
Domini!" in the National Gallery, principally because he has looked
deep into the legend, and revealed its true and human significance.
It is a small picture, about three feet by two, and is destitute of
all technical accomplishment, or even habit. It is painted in white
and blue, and the streak of red in the foreground, the red of a screen
on which is embroidered the lily--emblem of purity--adds to the chill
and coldness. Drawn up upon her white bed the Virgin crouches, silent
with expectation, listening to the mystic dream that has come upon her
in the dim hush of dawn. The large blue eyes gleam with some strange
joy that is quickening in her. The mouth and chin tell no tale, but
the eyes are deep pools of light, and mirror the soul that is on fire
within. The red hair falls about her, a symbol of the soul. In the
drawn-up knees, faintly outlined beneath the white sheet, the painter
hints at her body's beauty. One arm is cast forward, the hand not
clenched but stricken. Behind her a blue curtain hangs straight from
iron rods set on either side of the bed. Above the curtain a lamp is
burning dimly, blighted by the pallor of the dawn. A dead, faint
sky--the faint ashen sky which precedes the first rose tint; the
circular window is filled with it, and the paling blue of the sky's
colour contrasts with the deep blue of the bed's curtain, on which the
Virgin's red hair is painted.
The angel stands by the side of the white bed--I should say floats,
his fair feet hanging out of a few pale flames. White raiment clothes
him, falling in long folds, leaving the arms and feet bare; in the
right hand he holds a lily all in blossom; the left hand is extended
in rigid gesture of warning. Brown-gold hair grows thick about the
angel's neck; the shadowed profile is outlined against the hard, sad
sky; the expression of the face is deep and sphinx-like; he has come,
it is clear, from vast realms of light, where uncertainty and doubt
are unknown. The Dove passes by him towards the Virgin. Look upon her
again, crouching in her white bed, her knees drawn to her bosom, her
deep blue eyes--her dawn-tinted eyes--filled with ache, dream, and
expectation. The shadows of dawn are on wall and floor--strange, blue
shadows!--the Virgin's shadow lies on the wall, the angel's shadow
falls across the coverlet.
Here, at least, there is drama, and the highest form of
drama--spiritual drama; here, at least, there is story, and the
highest form of story--symbol and suggestion. Rossetti has revealed
the essence of this intensely human story--a story that, whenever we
look below the surface, which is mediaeval and religious, we recognise
as a story of to-day, of yesterday, of all time. A girl thralled by
the mystery of conception awakes at morn in palpitations, seeing
visions.
Mr. Hacker's telling of the legend is to Rossetti's what a story in
the _London Journal_ is to a story by Balzac. The Virgin has
apparently wandered outside the town. She is dressed in a long white
garment neither beautiful nor explicit: is it a nightdress, or a piece
of conventional drapery? On the right there is a long, silly tree,
which looks as if it had been evolved out of a ball of green wool with
knitting-needles, and above her floats an angel attired in a wisp of
blue gauze. Rossetti, we know, was, in the strict sense of the word,
hardly a painter at all, but he had something to say; and we can bear
in painting, as we can in literature, with faulty expression, if there
is something behind it. What is most intolerable in art is scholastic
rodomontade. And what else is Mr. Hacker's execution? In every
transmission the method seems to degenerate, and in this picture it
seems to have touched bottom. It has become loose, all its original
crispness is lost, and, complicated with _la peinture claire_, it
seems incapable of expressing anything whatsoever. There is no variety
of tone in that white sheet, there is nobody inside it, and the angel
is as insincere and frivolous as any sketch in a young lady's album.
The building at the back seems to have been painted with the scrapings
of a dirty palette, and the sky in the left-hand corner comes out of
the picture. I have only to add that the picture has been purchased
out of the Chantry Bequest Fund, and the purchase is considered to be
equivalent to a formal declaration that Mr. Hacker will be elected an
Associate of the Royal Academy at the next election.
Mr. Hacker's election to the Academy--I speak of this election as a
foregone conclusion--following as it does the election of Mr. Stanhope
Forbes, makes it plain that the intention of the Academy is to support
to the full extent of its great power a method of painting which is
foreign and unnatural to English art, which, in the opinion of a large
body of artists--and it is valuable to know that their opinion is
shared by the best and most original of the French artists--is
disintegrating and destroying our English artistic tradition. Mr.
Hacker's election, and the three elections that will follow it, those
of Mr. Shannon, Mr. Alfred East, and Mr. Bromley, will be equivalent
to an official declaration that those who desire to be English
Academicians must adopt the French methods. Independent of the
national disaster that these elections will inflict on art, they will
be moreover flagrant acts of injustice. For I repeat, among the forty
Academicians there is not one who considers these future Academicians
to be comparable to Mr. Whistler, Mr. Albert Moore, Mr. Swan, or Mr.
Sargent. No one holds such an opinion, and yet there is no doubt which
way the elections in the Academy will go.
The explanation of this incredible anomaly I have given, the
explanation is not a noble one, but that is not a matter for which I
can be held responsible; suffice it to say, that my explanation is the
only possible explanation. The Academy is a private commercial
enterprise, and conducts its business on the lines which it considers
the most advantageous; its commercialism has become flagrant and
undeniable. If this is so--how the facts can otherwise be explained I
cannot see--it is to be regretted that the Academy got its beautiful
site for nothing. But regrets are vain. The only thing to do now is to
see that the Academy is no longer allowed to sail under false colours.
This article may awaken in the Academy a sense that it is not well to
persist in open and flagrant defiance of public opinion, or it may
serve to render the Academicians even more stiff-necked than before.
In either case it will have accomplished its purpose.