The general art patron in England is a brewer or distiller.
Five-and-forty is the age at which he begins to make his taste felt in
the art world, and the cause of his collection is the following, or an
analogous reason. After a heavy dinner, when the smoke-cloud is
blowing lustily, Brown says to Smith: "I know you don't care for
pictures, so you wouldn't think that Leader was worth fifteen hundred
pounds; well, I paid all that, and something more too, at the last
Academy for it." Smith, who has never heard of Leader, turns slowly
round on his chair, and his brain, stupefied with strong wine and
tobacco, gradually becomes aware of a village by a river bank seen in
black silhouette upon a sunset sky. Wine and food have made him
happily sentimental, and he remembers having seen a village looking
very like that village when he was paying his attentions to the eldest
Miss Jones. Yes, it was looking like that, all quite sharp and clear
on a yellow sky, and the trees were black and still just like those
trees. Smith determines that he too shall possess a Leader. He may not
be quite as big a man as Brown, but he has been doing pretty well
lately.... There's no reason why he shouldn't have a Leader. So
irredeemable mischief has been done at Brown's dinner-party: another
five or six thousand a year will henceforth exert its mighty influence
in the service of bad art.
Poor Smith, who never looked attentively at a picture before, does not
see that what inspires such unutterable memories of Ethel Jones is but
a magnified Christmas card; the dark trees do not suggest treacle to
him, nor the sunset sky the rich cream which he is beginning to feel
he partook of too freely; he does not see the thin drawing, looking as
if it had been laboriously scratched out with a nail, nor yet the
feeble handling which suggests a child and a pot of gum. But of
technical achievement how should Mr. Smith know anything?--that
mysterious something, different in every artist, taking a thousand
forms, and yet always recognisable to the educated eye. How should
poor Smith see anything in the picture except what Mr. Whistler
wittily calls "rather a foolish sunset"? To perceive Mr. Leader's
deficiency in technical accomplishment may seem easy to the young girl
who has studied drawing for six months at South Kensington; but Smith
is a stupid man who has money-grubbed for five-and-twenty years in the
City; and through the fumes of wine and tobacco he resolves to have a
Leader. He does not hesitate, he consults no one--and why should he?
Mr. Leader put R.A. after his name--he charges fifteen hundred.
Besides, the village on the river bank with a sunset behind is
obviously a beautiful thing.... The mischief has been done, the
irredeemable mischief has been achieved. Smith buys a Leader, and the
Leader begets a Long, the Long begets a Fildes, the Fildes begets a
Dicksee, the Dicksee begets a Herkomer.
Such is the genesis of Mr. Smith's collection, and it is typical of a
hundred now being formed in London. In ten years Mr. Smith has laid
out forty or fifty thousand pounds. He asks his friends if they don't
like his collection quite as well as Brown's: he urges that he can't
see much difference himself. Nor is there much difference. The same
articles--that is to say, identically similar articles--vulgarly
painted sunsets, vulgarly painted doctors, vulgarly painted babies,
vulgarly painted manor-houses with saddle-horses and a young lady
hesitating on the steps, have been acquired at or about the same
prices. The popular R.A.s have appealed to popular sentiment, and
popular sentiment has responded; and the City has paid the price. But
Time is not at all a sentimental person: he is quite unaffected by the
Adelphi reality of the doctor's face or the mawkish treacle of the
village church; and when the collection is sold at auction twenty
years hence, it will fetch about a fourth of the price that was paid.
Mr. Smith's artistic taste knows no change; it was formed on Mr.
Brown's Leader, and developing logically from it, passing through
Long, Fildes, and Dicksee, it touches high-water mark at Hook. The
pretty blue sea and the brown fisher-folk call for popular admiration
almost as imperatively as the sunset in the village churchyard; and
when an artist--for in his adventures among dealers Mr. Smith met one
or two--points out how much less like treacle Mr. Hook is than Mr.
Leader, and how much more flowing and supple the drawing of the
sea-shore is than the village seen against the sunset, Mr. Smith
thinks he understands what is meant. But remembering the fifteen
hundred pounds he paid for the cream sky and the treacle trees, he is
quite sure that nothing could be better.
The ordinary perception of the artistic value of a picture does not
arise above Mr. Smith's. I have studied the artistic capacity of the
ordinary mind long and diligently, and I know my analysis of it is
exact; and if I do not exaggerate the artistic incapabilities of Mr.
Smith, it must be admitted that the influence which his money permits
him to exercise in the art world is an evil influence, and is
exercised persistently to the very great detriment of the real artist.
But it will be said that the moneyed man cannot be forbidden to buy
the pictures that please him. No, but men should not be elected
Academicians merely because their pictures are bought by City men, and
this is just what is done. Do not think that Sir John Millais is
unaware that Mr. Long's pictures, artistically considered, are quite
worthless. Do not think that Mr. Orchardson does not turn in contempt
from Mr. Leader's tea-trays. Do not think that every artist, however
humble, however ignorant, does not know that Mr. Goodall's portrait of
Mrs. Kettlewell stands quite beyond the range of criticism. Mr. Long,
Mr. Leader, and Mr. Goodall were not elected Academicians because the
Academicians who voted for them approved of their pictures, but
because Mr. Smith and his like purchased their pictures; and by
electing these painters to Academic honours the taste of Mr. Smith
receives official confirmation.
The public can distinguish very readily--far better than it gets
credit for--between bad literature and good; nor is the public deaf to
good music, but the public seems quite powerless to distinguish
between good painting and bad. No, I am wrong; it distinguishes very
well between bad painting and good, only it invariably prefers the
bad. The language of speech we are always in progress of learning; and
the language of music being similar to that of speech, it becomes
easier to hear that Wagner is superior to Rossini than to see that
Whistler is better than Leader. Of all languages none is so difficult,
so varying, so complex, so evanescent, as that of paint; and yet it is
precisely the works written in this language that every one believes
himself able to understand, and ready to purchase at the expense of a
large part of his fortune. If I could make such folk understand how
illusory is their belief, what a service I should render to art--if I
could only make them understand that the original taste of man is
always for the obvious and the commonplace, and that it is only by
great labour and care that man learns to understand as beautiful that
which the uneducated eye considers ugly.
Why will the art patron never take advice? I should seek it if I
bought pictures. If Degas were to tell me that a picture I had
intended to buy was not a good one I should not buy it, and if Degas
were to praise a picture in which I could see no merit I should buy it
and look at it until I did. Such confession will make me appear
weak-minded to many; but this is so, because much instruction is
necessary even to understand how infinitely more Degas knows than any
one else can possibly know. The art patron never can understand as
much about art as the artist, but he can learn a good deal. It is
fifteen years since I went to Degas's studio for the first time. I
looked at his portraits, at his marvellous ballet-girls, at the
washerwomen, and understood nothing of what I saw. My blindness to
Degas's merit alarmed me not a little, and I said to Manet--to whom I
paid a visit in the course of the afternoon--"It is very odd, Manet, I
understand your work, but for the life of me I cannot see the great
merit you attribute to Degas." To hear that some one has not
understood your rival's work as well as he understands your own is
sweet flattery, and Manet only murmured under his breath that it was
very odd, since there were astonishing things in Degas.
Since those days I have learnt to understand Degas; but unfortunately
I have not been able to transmit my knowledge to any one. When
important pictures by Degas could be bought for a hundred and a
hundred and fifty pounds apiece, I tried hard to persuade some City
merchants to buy them. They only laughed and told me they liked Long
better. Degas has gone up fifty per cent, Long has declined fifty per
cent. Whistler's can be bought to-day for comparatively small prices;
[Footnote: This was written before the Whistler boom.] in twenty years
they will cost three times as much; in twenty years Mr. Leader's
pictures will probably not be worth half as much as they are to-day.
What I am saying is the merest commonplace, what every artist knows;
but go to an art patron--a City merchant--and ask him to pay five
hundred for a Degas, and he will laugh at you; he will say, "Why,
I could get a Dicksee or a Leader for a thousand or two."