held some years ago, when the bonnets were five deep trying to get a
glimpse of a picture of half a dozen red prelates who were listening
to a missionary's story. Many of these devotees went into raptures
over the brass nails in the sofa, and were only disappointed when they
could not read the monogram on the bishop's ring. Later on, a highly
cultivated and intelligent American citizen was so entranced that he
bought the missionary, story and all, for the price of a brown-stone
front, and carried him away that he might enjoy him forever.
One month later, almost exactly in the same spot hung another picture,
the subject of which I forget, or it may be that I did not understand
it or that it had no subject at all. If I remember, it was not like
anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters
under the earth. In this respect one could have fallen down and
worshipped it and escaped the charge of idolatry. With the exception
of a few stray art critics, delighted at an opportunity for a new
sensation, it was not surrounded by an idolatrous gathering at all. On
the contrary, the audience before it reminded me more of Artemas Ward
and his panorama.
"When I first exhibited this picture in New York," he said, "the
artists came with lanterns before daybreak to look at it, and then
they called for the artist, and when he appeared--they threw things at
him."
For one picture a gentleman gave a brown-stone front; for the other he
would not have given a single brick, unless he had been sure of
planting it in the middle of the canvas the first shot. The first was
Vibert's realistic picture so well known to you. The other was an
example of the modern French school or what was then known as advanced
impressionists.
I shall not go into an analysis of the technic of the two painters. I
refer to them and their brush work here because of the undue value set
upon the way a thing is done rather than its value after it is done.
Speaking for myself, I must admit that the value of technic has never
impressed me as have the other and greater qualities in a
picture--namely, its expression of truth and the message it carries of
beauty and often tenderness. I have always held that it is of no
moment to the world at large by what means and methods an artist
expresses himself; that the world is only concerned as to whether he
has expressed himself at all; and if so, to what end and extent.
If the artist says to us, "I scumbled in the background solid, using
bitumen as an undertone, then I dragged over my high lights and
painted my cool color right into it," it is as meaningless to most of
us as if another bread-winner had said, "I use a Singer with a
straight shuttle and No. 60 cotton." What we want to know is whether
she made the shirt.
Art terms are, however, synonymous with other terms and in this
connection may be of assistance. To make my purpose clear we will
suppose that "technic" in art is handwriting. "Composition," the
arrangement of sentences. "Details," the choice of words. "Drawing,"
good grammar. "Mass, or light and shade," contrasting expressions
giving value each to the other. I hold, however, that there is
something more. The author may write a good hand, spell correctly,
and have a proper respect for Lindley Murray, but what does he say?
What idea does he convey? Has he told us anything of human life, of
human love, of human suffering or joy, or uncovered for us any fresh
hiding-place of nature and taught us to love it? Or is it only words?
It really matters very little to any of us what the handwriting of an
author may be, and so it should matter very little how an artist
touches the canvas.
It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most
elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of
the painter. He may write in the Munich style, or after the manner of
the Duesseldorf ready writers, or the modern French pothook and hanger,
or the antiquated Dutch. He can use the English of Chaucer, or
Shakespeare, or Josh Billings, at his own good pleasure. If he conveys
an intelligible idea he has accomplished a result the value of which
is just in proportion to the quality of that idea.
To continue this parallel, it may be said that extreme realism is the
use of too many words in a sentence and too many sentences in a
paragraph; extreme impressionism, the use of too few. Neither,
however, is fundamental, and art can be good, bad, or indifferent
containing each or combining both.
Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing
of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail.
Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and
the expression of only its salient features.
The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been
insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like
a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle
and every crack in the blade became apparent.
The more advanced would have insisted on not only the fibre in the
wood, but the brand on the other side of the blade, had it been
physically possible to show it.
In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who
maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of
shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with
uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol
of labor; that he used it as he would use a word necessary to express
a sentence, which would be unintelligible without it, and that it was
perfectly immaterial to him, and should be to the world, whether it
was a spade or a shovel so long as the soft twilight, and the reverent
figures wearied with the day's work, and the flat waste of field
stretching away to the little village spire on the dim horizon line
told the story of human suffering and patience and toil, as with
folded hands they listened to the soft cadence of the angelus.
Which of these two methods of expression is correct--Ruskin or Millet?
Are there any laws which govern, or is it a matter of taste, fancy, or
feeling? Is it a matter of individuality? If so, which individual by
his methods tells us the most truths? Let us endeavor to analyze.
I whirl through a mountain gorge and catch a glance through a
car-window--an impression. In the darkness of the tunnel it remains
with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the
dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed
with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With
my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and
wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my
surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas
the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow
men. If it is the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the
day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall
grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a
gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted
express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own
Inness.
Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity.
I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine,
but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all
perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the
clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory
is so bad--and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected.
The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of
fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the
trees, and the foliage until each particular leaf stands on end, and
the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into
my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.
Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my
magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction
that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except
through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my
impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest,
I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt
about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have
labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and
equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I
forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian--that I have been
invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my
goddess would veil from my sight; that I have had the impertinence to
bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted
that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were
necessary to this expression of nature's sublimity.
Is it at all strange that the impression which so charmed me as I saw
it from my car-window has faded? Nature unrolled for me suddenly a
poem. For symbols she used a great mass of dark, sturdy trees against
a majestic cloud, a rugged cliff, and a straggling path. I have
ignored them all and insisted that "truth was mighty and must
prevail." I am a realist and "paint things as they are." Not so. I am
an iconoclast and have broken my god and cannot put together the
pieces. I have sacrificed a divine impression to a human realism.
Suppose, however, that the painter who had this glimpse of nature
before entering the tunnel was no ordinary man, but a man of steadfast
mind, of firm convictions, of a sure touch, with an absolute belief
in nature, and so reverential that he dare not offer even a suggestion
of his own. He has seen it; he has felt it; it has gone down deep into
his memory and heart. The cloud, the cliff, the mass, the path--that
is all. And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, the seductions of
fresh impressions of newer subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not
deter him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of all else, and with a
direct simplicity, he records what he saw, and lo! we have a poem.
Such a man was Courbet, Corot, Dupre.
But one would say: That may answer for landscape: what about the
figure-painter? Let us counsel together.
A man only rises to his own level. In art, as in music and literature,
he only expresses himself. Each selects his own method. The school of
Meissonier is not content with a few grand truths simply expressed.
They want a multitude of facts; they must tell the story in their own
way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and
reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says
Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very
well, what of it? you say. What do you criticise, the drawing? No. The
color? No. The composition? No. Does the painter express himself?
Perfectly. What then? Just this. He expresses himself too perfectly.
At first I am delighted. The story is so well told--the well-fed
prelates; the half-sneer; the cynical smile; the earnest missionary
telling his experience. But the next day?--well, he is still telling
it. By the end of the week the enjoyment is confined to allowing him
to tell it to a fresh eye, and that eye another's, and watching his
pleasure. At the end of the year it becomes a part of the decoration
of the wall. You perhaps feel that the frame needs retouching, and
that is all the impression it makes upon you, except as would an old
timepiece with the mainspring gone. The works are exquisite and the
enamelling charming, but it has been four o'clock for forty years.
In the library, however, hangs an etching which you often look at; in
fact, you never pass it without noticing it. Two figures, a
wheelbarrow, a spade, a stretch of country, a spire pencilled against
a low-tone sky; and yet, somehow, you hear the tolling of the bell and
the whispered prayer. Ah! but you say this has nothing to do with the
treatment; it is the subject. One moment. The missionary's story is as
full of pathos and of human suffering and courage as the "Angelus,"
and at first as profoundly stirs our sympathy; but, in one, Vibert has
monopolized the conversation; he has exhausted the subject; he has
told you everything he knows. Nothing has been omitted; nails,
monograms, and all; there is nothing left for you to supply--he is not
so complimentary. But Millet has taken you into his confidence. He
says: "Come, see what I once saw. Do you ever remember any such couple
working in the field?" And you immediately, and unconsciously to
yourself, remember just such a bent back and reverent, uncovered head.
Where, you cannot tell, for the picture comes to you out of the dim
lumber-room in your brain where you store your old memories and faint
impressions of bygone days and sad faces.
But if he added, "See, my peasant wears a woollen jacket trimmed with
worsted braid," your impression would immediately fade. You might
remember the jacket, but the braid, never. But for this it would have
been delightful for you, although unconsciously, to add your own sweet
memory to the picture.
Another impression choked to death with unnecessary realism.
But be you realist or impressionist, remember that a true work of art
is that which has pleased _the greatest number of people for the
longest period of time_; that the love of beauty indicates our highest
intellectual plane, and that if you will express to your fellow
sinners burdened with life's cares something of the enthusiasm of your
own life, and will assist them to see their mother earth through your
own eyes in constantly increasing beauty--you having by your art, in
your possession, the key to the cipher, and interpreting and
translating for them--you will confer upon them one of the greatest
blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere.
WATER-COLORS
Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God
gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make
everything gray--every rose but the shadow of itself--every tree and
rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we
look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and
glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as
the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the
clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as
the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite
gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the
true painter fill it with joy and beauty.
There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom
the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us
walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others
ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain,
whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human
impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led
up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red,
yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected
in a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it
before. Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a
plate of tomato soup."
The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should
be taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is
as great an educator as true music. This knowledge of color harmony,
this matching and contrasting of different colors, but very few men
and women possess. When they do, it is generally inherited and thus a
natural gift. The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange
and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as
bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held
that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration,
furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into,
have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature--that the
russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues
of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow;
the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the
gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the
black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and
analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world
from a bonnet to a chateau. To illustrate:
Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, a distinguished
architect of New York, the late Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number
of cottages at Tuxedo sought in vain for some color mixture current in
the paint-shops with which to cover the outside of his buildings. All
schemes of browns, olive-greens, colonial yellow with white trimmings
and the reverse, Pompeiian reds, slate-grays, and dull yellows
resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that the effect he wished
to produce, that of the houses being merged into the forest, was lost.
Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as well. He
had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste,
with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only
needed change of occupation to make him a painter. One day, looking at
a new bare wooden cottage--unpainted as yet--in contrast to a mass of
foliage in the early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in
which the yellow-grays one often sees predominated, he suddenly
thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not stand out;
they are all of one piece, each keeping its place, while my house"--as
he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it--"sticks up like a
sore thumb." Later, this very clever man made an analysis of the local
color in these several grays, and his subsequent matching and
combining of these different tints resulted in the exact tones of the
forest before him, and when this was completed and the house painted
you felt should you enter the front door that the leaves must be over
your head.
Bringing the discussion down to more practical details, really to the
palettes which we hold in our hands, the question then naturally
arises as to how best to express true local color, with its varying
blues, yellows, and reds, and especially its varying grays.
In my own experience I find grays to be the prevailing tones
everywhere in nature.
I find also that the great masters of modern art, particularly the
school of 1830, known as the Barbizon school, and represented by such
men as Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Millet, and later by men
who in some degree represent that school, but to my mind have done
work equally good--even Montenard and Cazin--that all these masters
have loved, sought for, and expressed in their work this
all-prevailing quality, the gray.
A few very simple rules for testing the power, presence, and quality
of the prevailing gray in nature are so easily learned and so
convincing in their application that once applied they are never
forgotten.
Take, for instance, a morning in late spring or early summer, when all
nature is dressed from tree-top to grass-blade in a suit of vivid
green. To a tyro with so dangerous a weapon as a color-box, there is
nothing that will really bring down this game but some explosive
composed of indigo and Indian yellow, or Prussian blue and light
cadmium--perhaps the strongest mixture of vivid raw green.
Now, pluck a single leaf from a near-by branch, hold it close to one
eye, and with this as a guide note the difference in color tones
between it and the leaves on the tree from which you plucked the leaf
and which you had believed to be a vivid green. To your surprise, the
leaf itself, even with the sun shining through it, is many tones lower
and grayer than the color of the near-by branch as depicted on your
paper, while the near-by branch, in comparison, pales into a sable
gray-green, which you could perhaps get with yellow ochre, blue-black,
and a touch of chrome-yellow.
It does not seem to me that I can better illustrate this quality of
the gray than by rapidly going over some of the works of George Inness
lately on exhibition in New York--certainly to me the most marvellous
examples of the power of a human mind to harmonize the subtle
colorings of nature. I select Inness not only because he is to me one
of the great landscape-painters of his day, but because he chooses a
very wide range of subjects, from early morning to twilight,
expressing these truthfully, absolutely, perfectly, so far as local
color is concerned--that is, of course, as I see through either my own
spectacles or Inness's; but, then, remember, our eyes may need repair.
When these canvases are analyzed we find in the range of color nothing
stronger than yellow ochre in yellows, than light red in reds, and,
with hardly an exception, blue-black for blues. Indeed, his usual
palette, as does Mauve's and Cazin's, seems to me to be only yellow
ochre and blue-black, and with these two colors he expresses the
whole range of the color scheme in nature, with the varying lights of
day and night, except in depicting sunsets.
* * * * *
After the salient features of a landscape have been analyzed and
recorded in color, the more subtle qualities are to be detected and
expressed. The most important of these is the time of day. To an
outdoor painter--an expert examining the work of another expert--the
hour-hand is written over every square inch of the canvas. He knows
from the angle of the shadows just how high the sun was in the
heavens, and he knows, too, from the local color of the shadows
whether it is a silvery light of the morning, the glare of noontime,
or the deepening golden glow of the afternoon. In fact, if you will
think for a moment, the shadow of an overhanging balcony upon a white
wall is a perfect sun-dial for him, and this test can be indefinitely
applied to every part of the picture.
The next is the temperature: how hot or how cold it was--what month in
the year? It is unnecessary for Inness to cover his ground with snow
to make his picture express a certain degree of cold, neither is it
necessary for Montenard to fill his Provencal roads with clouds of
dust to show how hot they are. This is done by the opalescent tones of
the sky, by the values expressed in reflected lights and in the
illuminated shadows, so that you feel in looking across one of
Inness's fields of brown grass just how late is the autumn and just
how cool it has been, and in looking down one of Montenard's roads you
realize how useless would be an overcoat.
[Illustration: Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames]
In this connection let me say that all nature is interesting and all
nature is beautiful, but all nature, as I have said, is not paintable.
The interior of a railroad station, for instance, is interesting,
as giving you certain mechanical results, construction, but it is not
picturesque--that is, paintable--unless one could treat it as Pennell
does, contrasting the black cars and locomotive with a puff of white
steam, giving the vistas with the perspective of track, and a centre
mass of people adding an idea of movement and color.
Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of
the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must
look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture
clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be
moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in
the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England.
Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place,
can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is
really the heart of the whole mystery.
Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors--the art of depicting nature
on a sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water--it will be
well to remind you that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times.
A few weeks ago, in the library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the
American Academy in Rome, I saw one of the earliest water-colors in
existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate, and, although some
thousands of years old, still retained its color and remarkable
brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object
being a girl of wonderful grace.