THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.

This, the ninth season of the New English Art Club, has been marked by

a decisive step. The club has rejected two portraits of Mr. Shannon.

So that the public may understand and appreciate the importance of

this step, I will sketch, _à coups de crayon peu fondus_, the portrait

of a lady as I imagine Mr. Shannon might have painted her. A woman of

thirty, an oval face, and a long white brow; pale brown hair,

tastefully arranged with flowers and a small plume. The eyes large and

tender, expressive of a soul that yearns and has been misunderstood.

The nose straight, the nostrils well-defined, slightly dilated; the

mouth curled, and very red. The shoulders large, white, and

over-modelled, with cream tints; the arms soft and rounded; diamond

bracelets on the wrists; diamonds on the emotional neck. Her dress is

of the finest duchesse satin, and it falls in heavy folds. She holds a

bouquet in her hands; a pale green garden is behind her; swans are

moving gracefully through shadowy water, whereon the moon shines

peacefully. Add to this conception the marvellous square brushwork of

the French studio, and you have the man born to paint English

duchesses--to paint them as they see themselves, as they would be seen

by posterity; and through Mr. Shannon our duchesses realise all their

aspirations, present and posthumous. The popularity of these pictures

is undoubted; wherever they hang, and they hang everywhere, except in

the New English Art Club, couples linger. "How charming, how

beautifully dressed, how refined she looks!" and the wife who has not

married a man _à la hauteur de ses sentiments_ casts on him a

withering glance, which says, "Why can't you afford to let me be

painted by Mr. Shannon?"

We are here to realise our ideals, and far is it from my desire to

thwart any lady in her aspirations, be they in white or violet satin,

with or without green gardens. If I were on the hanging committee of

the Royal Academy, all the duchesses in the kingdom should be

realised, and then--I would create more duchesses, and they, too,

should be realised by Messrs. Shannon, Hacker, and Solomon _les chefs

de rayon de la peinture_. And when these painters arrived, each with a

van filled with new satin duchesses, I would say, "Go to Mr. Agnew,

ask him what space he requires, and anything over and above they shall

have it." I would convert the Chantrey Fund into white satin

duchesses, and build a museum opposite Mr. Tate's for the blue. I

would do anything for these painters and their duchesses except hang

them in the New English Art Club.

For it is entirely necessary that the public should never be left for

a moment in doubt as to the intention of this club. It is open to

those who paint for the joy of painting; and it is entirely

disassociated from all commercialism. Muslin ballet-girl or satin

duchess it matters no jot, nothing counts with the jury but _l'idée

plastique_: comradeship, money gain or loss, are waived. The rejection

of Mr. Shannon's portraits will probably cost the club four guineas a

year, the amount of his subscription, and it will certainly lose to

the club the visits of his numerous drawing-room following. This is to

be regretted--in a way. The club must pay its expenses, but it were

better that the club should cease than that its guiding principle

should be infringed.

Either we may or we may not have a gallery from which popular painting

is excluded. I think that we should; but I know that Academicians and

dealers are in favour of enforced prostitution in art. That men should

practise painting for the mere love of paint is wholly repugnant to

every healthy-minded Philistine. The critic of the Daily Telegraph

described the pictures in the present exhibition as things that no one

would wish to possess; he then pointed out that a great many were

excellently well painted. Quite so. I have always maintained that

there is nothing that the average Englishman--the reader of the _Daily

Telegraph_--dislikes so much as good painting. He regards it in the

light of an offence, and what makes it peculiarly irritating in his

eyes is the difficulty of declaring it to be an immoral action; he

instinctively feels that it is immoral, but somehow the crime seems to

elude definition.

The Independent Theatre was another humble endeavour which sorely

tried the conscience of the average Englishman. That any one should

wish to write plays that were not intended to please the public--that

did not pay--was an unheard-of desire, morbid and unwholesome as could

well be, and meriting the severest rebuke. But the Independent Theatre

has somehow managed to struggle into a third year of life, and the New

English Art Club has opened its ninth exhibition; so I suppose that

the _Daily Telegraph_ will have to make up its mind, sorrowfully, of

course, and with regret, that there are folk still in London who are

not always ready to sell their talents to the highest bidder.

For painters and those who like painting, the exhibitions at the New

English Art Club are the most interesting in London. We find there no

anecdotes, sentimental, religious, or historical, nor the conventional

measuring and modelling which the Academy delights to honour in the

name of Art. At the New English Art Club, from the first picture to

the last, we find artistic effort; very often the effort is feeble,

but nowhere, try as persistently as you please, will you find the loud

stupidity of ordinary exhibitions of contemporary painting. This is a

plain statement of a plain truth--plain to artists and those few who

possess the slightest knowledge of the art of painting, or even any

faint love of it. But to the uncultivated, to the ignorant, and to the

stupid the New English Art Club is the very place where all the absurd

and abortive attempts done in painting in the course of the year are

exposed on view. If I wished to test a man's taste and knowledge in

the art of painting I would take him to the English Art Club and

listen for one or two minutes to what he had got to say.

Immediately on entering the room, before we see the pictures, we know

that they are good. For a pleasant soft colour, delicate and

insinuating as an odour of flowers, pervades the room. So we are glad

to loiter in this vague sensation of delicate colour, and we talk to

our friends, avoiding the pictures, until gradually a pale-faced woman

with arched eyebrows draws our eyes and fixes our thoughts. It is a

portrait by Mr. Sargent, one of the best he has painted. By the side

of a fine Hals it might look small and thin, but nothing short of a

fine Hals would affect its real beauty. My admiration for Mr. Sargent

has often hesitated, but this picture completely wins me. It has all

the qualities of Mr. Sargent's best work; and it has something more:

it is painted with that measure of calculation and reserve which is

present in all work of the first order of merit. I find the picture

described with sufficient succinctness in my notes: "A half-length

portrait of a woman, in a dress of shot-silk--a sort of red violet,

the colour known as puce. The face is pale, the chin is prominent and

pointed. There were some Japanese characteristics in the model, and

these have been selected. The eyes are long, and their look is aslant;

the eyebrows are high and marked; the dark hair grows round the pale

forehead with wig-like abruptness, and the painter has attempted no

attenuation. The carnations are wanting in depth of colour--they are

somewhat chalky; but what I admire so much is the exquisite selection,

besides the points mentioned--the shadowed outline, so full of the

form of her face, and the markings about the eyes, so like her; and

the rendering is full of the beauty of incomparable skill. The neck,

how well placed beneath the pointed chin! How exact in width, in

length, and how it corresponds with the ear; and the jawbone is under

the skin; and the anatomies are all explicit--the collar-bone, the

hollow of the arm-pit, and the muscle of the arm, the placing of the

bosom, its shape, its size, its weight. Mr. Sargent's drawing speaks

without hesitation, a beautiful, decisive eloquence, the meaning never

in excess of the expression, nor is the expression ever redundant."

I said that we find in this portrait reserve not frequently to be met

with in Mr. Sargent's work. What I first noticed in the picture was

the admirable treatment of the hands. They are upon her hips, the

palms turned out, and so reduced is the tone that they are hardly

distinguishable from the dress. As the model sat the light must have

often fallen on her hands, and five years ago Mr. Sargent might have

painted them in the light. But the portrait tells us that he has

learnt the last and most difficult lesson--how to omit. Any touch of

light on those hands would rupture the totality and jeopardise the

colour-harmony, rare without suspicion of exaggeration or affectation.

In the background a beautiful chocolate balances and enforces the

various shades of the shot-silk, and with severity that is fortunate.

By aid of two red poppies, worn in the bodice, a final note in the

chord is reached--a resonant and closing consonance; a beautiful work,

certainly: I should call it a perfect work were it not that the

drawing is a little too obvious: in places we can detect the manner;

it does not _coule de source_ like the drawing of the very great

masters.

Except Mr. Sargent, no one in the New English Art Club comes forward

with a clearly formulated style; everything is more or less tentative,

and I cannot entirely exempt from this criticism either Mr. Steer, Mr.

Clausen, or Mr. Walter Sickert. But this criticism must not be

understood as a reproach--surely this green field growing is more

pleasing than the Academy's barren stubble. I claim no more for the

New English Art Club than that it is the growing field. Say that the

crop looks thin, and that the yield will prove below the average, but

do not deny that what harvest there may be the New English Art Club

will bring home. So let us walk round this May field of the young

generation and look into its future, though we know that the summer

months will disprove for better or for worse.

Mr. Bernard Sickert, the youngest member of this club, a mere

beginner, a five- or six-year-old painter, has made, from exhibition

to exhibition, constant and consistent progress, and this year he

comes forward with two landscapes, both seemingly conclusive of a true

originality of vision, and there is a certain ease of accomplishment

in his work which tempts me to believe that a future is in store for

him. The differences of style in these two pictures do not affect my

opinion, for, on looking into the pictures, the differences are more

apparent than real--the palette has been composed differently, but

neither picture tells of any desire of a new outlook, or even to

radically change his mode of expression. The eye which observed and

remembered so sympathetically "A Spring Evening", over which a red

moon rose like an apparition, observed also the masts and the prows,

and the blue sea gay with the life of passing sail and flag, and the

green embaying land overlooking "A Regatta".

I hardly know which picture I prefer. I saw first "A Regatta", and was

struck by the beautiful drawing and painting of the line of boats,

their noses thrust right up into the fore water of the picture, a

little squadron advancing. So well are these boats drawn that the

unusual perspective (the picture was probably painted from a window)

does not interrupt for a second our enjoyment. A jetty on the right

stretches into the blue sea water, intense with signs of life, and the

little white sails glint in the blue bay, and behind the high green

hill the colours of a faintly-tinted evening fade slowly. The picture

is strangely complete, and it would be difficult to divine any reason

for disliking it, even amongst the most ignorant. "A Spring Evening"

is neither so striking nor so immediately attractive; its charm is

none the less real. An insinuating and gentle picture, whose delicacy

and simplicity I like.

The painter has caught that passing and pathetic shudder of coming

life which takes the end of a March day before the bud swells or a

nest appears. The faint chill twilight floats upon the field, and the

red moon mounts above the scrub-clad hillside into a rich grey sky,

beautifully graduated and full of the glamour of waning and

strengthening light. The slope of the field, too--it is there the

sheep are folded--is in admirable perspective. On the left, beyond the

hurdles, is a strip of green, perhaps a little out of tone, though I

know such colour persists even in very receding lights; and high up on

the right the blue night is beginning to show. The sheep are folded in

a turnip field, and the root-crop is being eaten down.

The month is surely March, for the lambs are still long-legged--there

one has dropped on its knees and is digging at the udder of the

passive ewe with that ferocious little gluttony which we know so well;

another lamb relieves its ear's first itching with its hind hoof--you

know the grotesque movement--and the field is full of the weird

roaming of animal life, the pathos of the unconscious, the pity of

transitory light. A little umber and sienna, a rich grey, not a bit of

drawing anywhere, and still the wandering forms of sheep and lambs

fully expressed, one sheep even in its particular physiognomy. Truly a

charming picture, spontaneous and simple, and proving a painter

possessed of a natural sentiment, of values, and willing to employ

that now most neglected method of pictorial expression, chiaroscuro.

Neglected by Mr. Steer, who seems prepared to dispense with what is

known as _une atmosphère de tableau_. Any one of his three pictures

will serve as an example. His portrait of a girl in blue I cannot

praise, not because I do not admire it, but because Mr. MacColl, the

art critic of the _Spectator_, our ablest art critic, himself a

painter and a painter of talent, has declared it to be superior to a

Romney. I will quote his words: "The word masterpiece is not to be

lightly used, but when we stand before this picture it is difficult to

think of any collection in which it would look amiss, or fail to hold

its own. If we talk of English masters, Romney is the name that most

naturally suggests itself, because in the bright clear face and brown

hair and large simplicity of presentment, there is a good deal to

recall that painter. But Romney's colour would look cheap beside this,

and his drawing conventional in observation, however big in style."

To go one better than this, I should have to say the picture was as

good as Velasquez, and to simply endorse Mr. MacColl's words would be

a second-hand sort of criticism to which I am not accustomed. Besides,

to do so would be to express nothing of my own personal sensations in

regard to this picture. So I will say at once that I do not understand

the introduction of Romney's name into the argument. If comparison

there must be, surely Mr. Watts would furnish one more appropriate.

Both in the seeing and in the execution the portrait seems nearer to

Mr. Watts than to Romney. Of Romney's gaiety there is no trace in Mr.

Steer's picture.

The girl sits in a light wooden arm-chair--her arm stretched in front

of her, the hands held between her knees--looking out of the picture

somewhat stolidly. The Lady Hamilton mood was an exaggerated mood, but

there is something of it in every portrait at all characteristic of

our great eighteenth-century artist. The portrait exhibited in this

year's show of Old Masters in the Academy will do--the lady who walks

forward, her hands held in front of her bosom, the fingers pressed

together, the white dress floating from the hips, the white brought

down with a yellow glaze. I do not think that we find either that

gaiety or those glazes in Mr. Steer. From many a Romney the cleaner

has removed an outer skin, but I am not speaking of those pictures.

But if I see very little Romney in Steer's picture, I am thankful that

I see at least very rare distinction in the figuration of a beautiful

and decorative ideal--a girl in blue sitting with her back to an open

window, full of the blue night, and on the other side the grey blind,

yellowing slightly under the glare of the lamp. I appreciate the very

remarkable and beautiful compromise between portrait-painting and

decoration. I see rare distinction (we must not be afraid of the word

distinction in speaking of Mr. Steer) in his choice of what to draw.

The colour scheme is well maintained, somewhat in the manner of Mr.

Watts, but neither the blue of the dress nor the blue of the night is

intrinsically beautiful, and we have only to think of the blues that

Whistler or Manet would have found to understand how deficient they

are.

The drawing of the face is neither a synthesis, nor is it intimately

characteristic of the model: it is simply rudimentary. A round girlish

face with a curled mouth and an ugly shadow which does not express the

nose. The shoulders are there, that we are told, but the anatomies are

wanting, and the body is without its natural thickness. Nor is the

drawing more explicit in its exterior lines than it is in its inner.

There is hardly an arm in that sleeve; the elbow would be difficult to

find, and the construction of the waist and hips is uncertain; the

drawing does not speak like Mr. Sargent's. Look across the room at his

portrait of a lady in white satin and you will see there a shadow, so

exact, so precise, so well understood, that the width of the body is

placed beyond doubt.

But the most radical fault in the portrait I have yet to point out; it

is lacking in atmosphere. There is none between us and the girl,

hardly any between the girl's head and the wall. The lamp-light effect

is conveyed by what Mr. MacColl would perhaps call a symbol, by the

shadow of the girl's head. We look in vain for transparent darknesses,

lights surrounded by shadows, transposition of tones, and the aspect

of things; the girl sits in a full diffused light, and were it not for

the shadow on the wall and the shadow cast by the nose, she might be

sitting in a conservatory. Speaking of another picture by Mr. Steer,

"Boulogne Sands", Mr. MacColl says: "The children playing, the holiday

encampment of the bathers' tents, the glint of people flaunting

themselves like flags, the dazzle of sand and sea, and over and

through it all the chattering lights of noon." I seize upon the

phrase, "The people flaunting themselves like flags." The simile is a

pretty one, and what suggested it to the writer is the detached colour

in the picture; and the colours are detached because there is no

atmosphere to bind them together; there are no attenuations,

transpositions of tone--in a word, none of those combinations of light

and shade which make _une atmosphère de tableau_.

And Mr. Steer's picture is merely an instance of a general tendency

which for the last twenty years has widened the gulf between modern

and ancient painting. It was Manet who first suggested _la peinture

claire_, and his suggestion has been developed by Roll, Monet, and

others, until oil-painting has become little more than a sheet of

white paper slightly tinted. Values have been diverted from their

original mission, which was to build up _une atmosphère de tableau_,

and now every value and colour finely observed seem to have for

mission the abolition of chiaroscuro. Without atmosphere painting

becomes a mosaic, and Mr. MacColl seems prepared to defend this return

to archaic formulas. This is what he says: "The sky of the sea-beach,

for example, if it be taken as representing form and texture, is

ridiculous; it is like something rough and chippy, and if the

suggestion gets too much in the way the method has overshot its mark.

Its mark is to express by a symbol the vivid life in the sky-colour,

the sea-colour, and the sand-colour, and it is doubtful if the

richness and subtlety of those colours can be conveyed in any other

way." Here I fail altogether to understand. If the sky's beauty can be

expressed by a symbol, why cannot the beauty of men and women be

expressed in the same way? How the infinities of aërial perspective

can be expressed by a symbol, I have no slightest notion; nor do I

think that Mr. MacColl has. In striving to excuse deficiencies in a

painter whose very real and loyal talent we both admire, he has

allowed his pen to run into dangerous sophistries. "The matter of

handling," he continues, "is then a moot point--a question of

temperament." Is this so?

That some men are born with a special aptitude for handling colour as

other men are born with a special sense of proportions is undeniable;

but Mr. MacColl's thought goes further than this barren platitude, and

if he means, as I think he does, that the faculty of handling is more

instinctive than that of drawing, I should like to point out to him

that handling did not become a merely personal caprice until the

present century. A collection of ancient pictures does not present

such endless experimentation with the material as a collection of

modern pictures. Rubens, Hals, Velasquez, and Gainsborough do not

contradict each other so violently regarding their use of the material

as do Watts, Leighton, Millais, and Orchardson.

In the nineteenth century no one has made such beautiful use of the

material as Manet and Whistler, and we find these two painters using

it respectively exactly like Hals and Velasquez. It would therefore

seem that those who excel in the use of paint are agreed as to the

handling of it, just as all good dancers are agreed as to the step.

But, though all good dancers dance the same step, each brings into his

practice of it an individuality of movement and sense of rhythm

sufficient to prevent it from becoming mechanical. The ancient

painters relied on differences of feeling and seeing for originality

rather than on eccentric handling of colour; and all these

extraordinary executions which we meet in every exhibition of modern

pictures are in truth no more than frantic efforts either to escape

from the thraldom of a bad primary education, or attempts to disguise

ignorance in fantastic formulas. That which cannot be referred back to

the classics is not right, and I at least know not where to look among

the acknowledged masters for justification for Mr. Steer's jagged

brushwork.

Mr. Walter Sickert, whose temperament is more irresponsible, is

nevertheless content within the traditions of oil-painting. He

exhibits two portraits, both very clever and neither satisfactory, for

neither are carried beyond the salient lines of character. Nature has

gifted Mr. Sickert with a keen hatred of the commonplace; his vision

of life is at once complex and fragmentary, his command on drawing

slow and uncertain, his rendering therefore as spasmodic as a poem by

Browning. He picks up the connecting links with difficulty, and even

his most complete work is full of omissions. The defect--for it is a

defect--is by no means so fatal in the art-value of a painting as the

futile explanations so dearly beloved by the ignorant. Manet was to

the end the victim of man's natural dislike of ellipses, and Mr.

Walter Sickert is suffering the same fate. Still, even the most remote

intelligence should be able to gather something of the merit of the

portrait of Miss Minnie Cunningham. How well she is in that long red

frock--a vermilion silhouette on a rich brown background! I should be

still more pleased if the vermilion had been slightly broken with

yellow ochre; but then, at heart, I am no more than _un vieux

classique_. The edges of the vermilion hat are lightened where it

receives the glare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer

from the red. It is as light, as pretty, as suggestive as may be. The

thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of

the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a manner I have not

seen elsewhere, the enigma of the artificial life of the stage.

The aestheticism of the Glasgow school, of which we have heard so much

lately, is identical with that of the New English Art Club, and the

two societies are in a measure affiliated. Nearly all the members of

the Glasgow school are members of the New English Art Club, and it is

regrettable that they do not unite and give us an exhibition that

would fairly stare the Academy out of countenance. Among the Glasgow

painters the most prominent and valid talent is Mr. Guthrie's. His

achievements are more considerable and more personal; and he seems to

approach very near to a full expression of the pictorial aspirations

of his generation. Years ago his name was made known to me by a

portrait of singular beauty; an oasis it was in a barren and bitter

desert of Salon pictures. Since then he has adopted a different and

better method of painting; and an excellent example of his present

style is his portrait of Miss Spencer, a lady in a mauve gown. The

slightness of the intention may be urged against the picture; it is no

more than a charming decoration faintly flushed with life. But in his

management of the mauve Mr. Guthrie achieved quite a little triumph:

and the foreground, which is a very thin grey passed over a dark

ground, is delicious, and the placing of the signature is in the right

place. Most artists sign their pictures in the same place. But the

signature should take a different place in every picture, for in every

picture there is one and only one right place for the signature; and

the true artist never fails to find the place which his work has

chosen and consecrated for his name.

I confess myself to be a natural and instinctive admirer of Mr.

Guthrie's talent. His picture, "Midsummer", exhibited at Liverpool,

charmed me. Turning to my notes I find this description of it: "A

garden in the summer's very moment of complete efflorescence; a bower

of limpid green, here and there interwoven with red flowers. And three

ladies are there with their tiny Japanese tea-table. One dress--that

on the left--is white, like a lily, drenched with green shadows; the

dress on the right is a purple, beautiful as the depth of foxglove

bells, A delicate and yet a full sensation of the beauty of modern

life, from which all grossness has been omitted--a picture for which I

think Corot would have had a good word to say." In the same exhibition

there was a pastel by Mr. Guthrie, which quite enchanted me with its

natural, almost naïve, grace. Turning to my notes I extract the

following lines: "A lady seated on a light chair, her body in profile,

her face turned towards the spectator; she wears a dress with red

stripes. One hand hanging by her side, the other hand holding open a

flame-coloured fan; and it is this that makes the picture. The feet

laid one over the other. The face, a mere indication; and for the

hair, charcoal, rubbed and then heightened by two or three touches of

the rich black of pastel-chalk. A delicate, a precious thing, rich in

memories of Watteau and Whistler, of boudoir inspiration, and whose

destination is clearly the sitting-room of a dilettante bachelor."

Mr. Henry, another prominent member of the Glasgow school, exhibited a

portrait of a lady in a straw hat--a rich and beautiful piece of

painting, somewhat "made up" and over-modelled, still a piece of

painting that one would like to possess. Mr. Hornell's celebrated

"Midsummer", the detestation of aldermen, was there too. Imagine the

picture cards, the ten of diamonds, and the eight of hearts shuffled

rapidly upon a table covered with a Persian tablecloth. To ignore what

are known as values seems to be the first principle of the Glasgow

school. Hence a crude and discordant coloration without depth or

richness. Hence an absence of light and the mystery of aërial

perspective. But I have spoken very fully on this subject elsewhere.

Fifteen years ago it was customary to speak slightingly of the Old

Masters, and it was thought that their mistakes could be easily

rectified. Their dark skies and black foregrounds hold their own

against all Monet's cleverness, and it has begun to be suspected that

even if nature be industriously and accurately copied in the fields,

the result is not always a picture. The palette gives the value of the

grass and of the trees, but, alas, not of the sky-the sky is higher in

tone than the palette can go; the painter therefore gets a false

value. Hence the tendency among the _plein airists_ to leave out the

sky or to do with as little sky as possible. A little reef is

sufficient to bring about a great shipwreck; a generation has wasted

half its life, and the Old Masters are again becoming the fashion. Mr.

Furse seems to be deeply impressed with the truth of the _new_

aestheticism. And he has succeeded within the limits of a tiny panel,

a slight but charming intention. "The Great Cloud" rolls over a strip

of lowland, lowering in a vast imperial whiteness, vague and shadowy

as sleep or death. Ruysdael would have stopped for a moment to watch

it. But its lyrical lilt would trouble a mind that could only think in

prose; Shelley would like it better, and most certainly it would not

fail to recall to his mind his own immortal verses--

"I am the daughter of earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of ocean and shores,

I change, but I cannot die."

What will become of our young artists and their aspirations is a tale

that time will unfold gradually, and for the larger part of its

surprises we shall have to wait ten years. In ten years many of these

aesthetes will have become common Academicians, working for the villas

and perambulators of numerous families. Many will have disappeared for

ever, some may be resurrected two generations hence, may be raised

from the dead like Mr. Brabazon, our modern Lazarus--

"Lazare allait mourir une seconds fois,"--

or perchance to sleep for ever in Sir Joshua's bosom. That a place

will be found there for Mr. Brabazon is one of the articles of faith

of the younger generation. Mr. Brabazon is described as an amateur,

and the epithet is marvellously appropriate; no one--not even the

great masters--deserved it better. The love of a long life is in those

water-colours--they are all love; out of love they have grown, in its

light they have flourished, and they have been made lovely with love.

In a time of slushy David Coxes, Mr. Brabazon's eyes were strangely

his own. Even then he saw Nature hardly explained at all--films of

flowing colour transparent as rose-leaves, the lake's blue, and the

white clouds curling above the line of hills--a sense of colour and a

sense of distance, that was all, and he had the genius to remain

within the limitations of his nature. And, with the persistency of

true genius, Mr. Brabazon painted, with a flowing brush, rose-leaf

water-colours, unmindful of the long indifference of two generations,

until it happened that the present generation, with its love of slight

things, came upon this undiscovered genius. It has hailed him as

master, and has dragged him into the popularity of a special

exhibition of his work at the Goupil Galleries. And it was inevitable

that the present young men should discover Mr. Brabazon: for in

discovering him, they were discovering themselves--his art is no more

than a curious anticipation of the artistic ideal of to-day.

The sketch he exhibits at the New English Art Club is a singularly

beautiful tint of rose, spread with delicate grace over the paper. A

little less, and there would be nothing; but a little beauty has

always seemed to me preferable to a great deal of ugliness. And what

is true about one is true about nearly all his drawings. We find in

them always an harmonious colour contrast, and very rarely anything

more. Sometimes there are those evanescent gradations of colour which

are the lordship and signature of the colourist, and when _le ton

local_ is carried through the picture, through the deepest shadows as

through the highest lights, when we find it persisting everywhere, as

we do in No. 19, "Lake Maggiore", we feel in our souls the joy that

comes of perfect beauty. But too frequently Mr. Brabazon's colour is

restricted to an effective contrast; he often skips a great many

notes, touching the extremes of the octave with certainty and with

grace.

But it is right that we should make a little fuss over Mr. Brabazon;

for though this work is slight, it is an accomplishment--he has

indubitably achieved a something, however little that something may

be; and when art is disappearing in the destroying waters of

civilisation, we may catch at straws. Beyond colour--and even in

colour his limitations are marked--Mr. Brabazon cannot go. He entered

St. Mark's, and of the delicacy of ornamentation, of the balance of

the architecture, he saw nothing; neither the tracery of carven column

nor the aërial perspective of the groined arches. It was his genius

not to see these things--to leave out the drawing is better than to

fumble with it, and all his life he has done this; and though we may

say that a water-colour with the drawing left out is a very slight

thing, we cannot fail to perceive that these sketches, though less

than sonnets or ballades, or even rondeaus or rondels--at most they

are triolets--are akin to the masters, however distant the

relationship.

I have not told you about the very serious progress that Mr. George

Thompson has made since the last exhibition; I have not described his

two admirable pictures; nor mentioned Mr. Linder's landscape, nor Mr.

Buxton Knight's "Haymaking Meadows", nor Mr. Christie's pretty picture

"A May's Frolic," nor Mr. MacColl's "Donkey Race". I have omitted much

that it would have been a pleasure to praise; for my intention was not

to write a guide to the exhibition, but to interpret some of the

characteristics of the young generation.

The New English Art Club is very typical of this end of the century.

It is young, it is interesting, it is intelligent, it is emotional, it

is cosmopolitan--not the Bouillon Duval cosmopolitanism of the Newlyn

School, but rather an agreeable assimilation of the Montmartre café of

fifteen years ago. Art has fallen in France, and the New English seems

to me like a seed blown over-sea from a ruined garden. It has caught

English root, and already English colour and fragrance are in the

flower. A frail flower; but, frail or strong, it is all we have of art

in the present generation. It is slight, and so most typical; for,

surely, no age was ever so slight in its art as ours? As the century

runs on it becomes more and more slight and more and more intelligent.

A sheet of Whatman's faintly flushed with a rose-tint, a few stray

verses characterised with a few imperfect rhymes and a wrong accent,

are sufficient foundation for two considerable reputations. The

education of the younger generation is marvellous; its brains are

excellent; it seems to be lacking in nothing except guts. As education

spreads guts disappear, and that is the most serious word I have to

say.

Without thinking of those great times when men lived in the giddiness

and the exultation of a constant creation--when a day was sufficient

for Rubens to paint the "Kermesse" thirteen days to paint the "Mages",

even or eight to paint the "Communion de St. François d'Assise"--and

blotting from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and

Veronese, let us merely remember that thirty years ago Millais painted

a beautiful picture every year until marriage and its consequences

brought his art to a sudden close. One year it was "Autumn Leaves",

the following year it was "St. Agnes' Eve", and behind these pictures

there were at least ten masterpieces--"The Orchard", "The Rainbow",

"Mariana in the Moated Grange", "Ophelia", etc. Millais is far behind

Veronese and Tintoretto in magnificent excellence and extraordinary

rapidity of production; but is not the New English Art Club even as

far behind the excellence and fertility of production of thirty years

ago?