very pictorial, provided always there is plenty of the dramatic element
in them:--“A Man Escaping to a City of Refuge”; “A Departure of
Emigrants”; “A Rescue from Fire”; “Launching the Life-Boat”; “Return
from Victory,” are all eminently suitable for painting, and yet there
are no kings and queens, nor even distinguished statesmen, poets, or
philosophers to be introduced. There are human interests of various
kinds to be excited, and this is quite enough.
War episodes are always interesting. We do not care to know the exact
spot or date of the engagement, we have no curiosity about the names of
the combatants, nor even much about their nationality. The scene itself
is sufficiently exciting without any accompanying explanation. It is
true that there are plenty of highly uninteresting battle-pictures, but
the fault lies with the treatment and not with the subject.
In selecting a subject, no matter whether from mythology, Scripture,
history, fiction, or every-day life, care should be taken to choose one
which has unity of action. There ought to be a story in your subject,
but not more than _one_ story. In your secondary groups you may have
separate action and by-play, but they ought somehow to be connected with
the main story of the picture, and instead of distracting the attention
from the subject, they ought rather to assist in concentrating it. Where
there is more than one centre of interest in a picture, the effect,
dramatically speaking, is weakened.
The old masters often disregarded the tolerably self-evident rule.
The famous Transfiguration picture of Raffaelle is a well-known instance
in point. The interest is divided between the Transfiguration proper
and the demoniac boy. Although some of the figures are pointing upward,
yet the faces are all turned toward the demoniac, and he is certainly
the principal focus of interest.
This blemish in Raffaelle’s picture is all the more unaccountable, as no
mention is anywhere made of a demoniac having been present at the time;
but the old masters (especially those of the German schools) abound in
incongruities of this kind. I remember seeing somewhere a picture of the
“Martyrdom of St. Lorenzo.”
The saint is about to be roasted alive, but the largest and most
prominent figure in the picture is one of the executioners, who is
making a horrible face, having got some of the smoke in his eye. The
introduction of these irrelevant and grotesque episodes cannot be
justified, however well they may be painted; and if it be granted that
it is undesirable to _select_ a subject in which there is more than one
centre of interest, how much more objectionable is it to _invent_
disturbing incidents which are not recorded in the text of the subject.
As an extreme instance of a bad selection of subject, I have always
thought that nothing could beat Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man.” The
lines suggest seven distinct subjects having no connection whatever with
each other. Each is very good of its kind; to attempt to amalgamate them
all into one picture is quite absurd. The result is extremely
unpleasant; suggesting a company of strolling players, each rehearsing
his part, or perhaps the court-yard of a mediæval lunatic asylum.
In justice to Mulready I ought to mention that he did not _select_ “the
seven ages of man” as a subject for his picture. He had the impossible
task imposed upon him by a liberal but injudicious patron.
For decorative work (for a frieze, for instance) such subjects as the
“seven ages of man” are well suited, because each “age” can be treated
separately, forming as it were a picture of itself, the only bond of
union between the seven being that the figures should be of the same
proportion, and should be similar in style and execution.
Another good rule to observe in selecting a subject is to choose one
which has illustrative action in it. What I mean by this is that the
action of the figures should be sufficient to explain the subject. You
cannot put words issuing from their mouths as is done in caricature, you
must therefore explain your story by action and expression. We will take
as examples two not dissimilar subjects. One shall be a meeting of
conspirators, and the other a conference of philosophers. Of course, I
don’t mean to insinuate that there is any analogy between philosophers
and conspirators, but that in both cases we have five or six figures
seated round a table. In the first we should represent our conspirators,
in close conclave, leaning over the table with their heads near
together, one or two perhaps grasping their daggers, another looking
round anxiously--in short, it would be very evident from the expression
and attitude of the figures that they were about some villainous work.
If we now turn to the other subject, the conference of philosophers, how
are we to express the purport of their conversation? What facial muscles
are called into play when men are talking metaphysics or expounding
their theories of evolution? It is clear that, however exquisite the
execution of the picture may be, the subject of it will be
unintelligible, without explanation, and even with the necessary
elucidation it will be inferior to the conspirators in dramatic
interest.
The subject I gave you in the life-school some time ago (I mean Peter’s
denial of Christ) is an eminently good one, because if properly treated
it is impossible to mistake the meaning of the figures. The menacing
interrogatory of the woman, Peter’s alarm for his personal safety, and
the jeers of the soldiers who are sitting round the fire, are all well
adapted for pictorial expression. Any one who had never read the New
Testament, an unconverted Chinaman for instance, would say at once:
“This young woman is taxing a middle-aged man with something he denies,
but there is such downright assertion in her action and such fear mixed
up with his denial, that the accusation, whatever it is, must be true.”
No subject can be called a really good one which requires a long
explanation to make it intelligible. Thus subjects in which the figures
are assuming characters which do not properly belong to them are unfit
for painting. For example, in the “conspirators” just mentioned, it
might very well have happened that to conceal their sinister designs
they assumed the mask of joviality, but you should not select this
particular phase of the story.
On the stage, this kind of make-believe is managed by an “aside.” The
actor takes the audience into his confidence when he says, “Here comes
the king, let us dissemble,” and accordingly for the next ten minutes or
so you are to understand that he is not the obsequious sycophant he
pretends to be, and lest by chance you should forget that he is
dissembling, he will come forward and frown, clench his fist or point
contemptuously over his shoulder at his fellow-actor, who, strangely
enough, never seems to see these ominous gestures.
All this is understood and accepted on the stage, but it does not do in
a picture. I would, therefore, advise you as much as possible to choose
subjects which can be understood at a glance. Let your personages appear
in their natural characters, and not assuming parts which do not belong
to them.
Acts of mercy, such as clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting
the sick, etc., are all good subjects, because the meaning is explained
directly by the action of the figures.
Speaking for myself, I have but little sympathy with subjects taken from
works of fiction.
The artist who selects them for pictorial treatment seems to me to
abnegate whatever creative power he may possess, and to become an
illustrator or translator of other men’s thoughts. Homer, Dante, and
Milton are of course exceptional poets. Their creations are heroic, and
the personifications of their heroes would be either nude or sternly
classical. Besides, they never descend to minute particulars, and the
artist is left very much to his own invention. The more detail an author
gives, and the more picturesque the detail, the less fitted are his
works for figure-pictures. Scott and Dickens are eminently unpaintable;
that is, it is a hopeless task to illustrate them. Pictures taken from
their works are always disappointing. The Ivanhoes, the Mrs. Gamps, and
the Pecksniffs of our imagination are always superior to their effigies
on canvas, and this is more or less the case with the personages of
Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière.
Costume has a great deal to do with the choice of a subject, and this,
no doubt, is the reason why the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and
Molière are such favorite hunting-grounds for artists. If the Prince of
Denmark had been a modern heir-apparent, attired in a frock coat, tweed
trousers, and a chimney-pot hat, or if Malvolio had worn the dress of an
ordinary British butler, we should not often see them painted.
For one picture taken from Thackeray’s modern novels, we find dozens
illustrating Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King,” or his “Holy Grail.”
Now, although the question of costume must always be an important factor
in the selection of a subject, it ought not to be the only one. A
picture should not be painted _merely_ for the sake of the costumes.
This seemed to me the principal fault in the large Austrian pictures of
the International Exhibition; and I may add that it is a fault which is
not altogether unknown in England.
There is one more class of subjects which I have not yet noticed, and
that is the domestic or “genre” class; the pictures, in short, of
every-day life. Pictures of this kind are much less dependent on a good
choice of subject than those which illustrate some historical incident.
They are generally prized for the brilliancy and harmony of their color,
or for the delicacy of their execution; and if these qualities exist in
a high degree, the subject is a minor consideration.
Still it ought to be a consideration, and in choosing subjects of this
class you should prefer those which are typical of the personages you
have to represent. If you attempt rustic pictures, not only should your
figures look like peasants, but the subject should be thoroughly
bucolic.
A dirty ploughman plodding wearily homeward along a muddy lane on a dull
November evening seems commonplace and prosaic enough, and yet the
subject would not be deficient in pictorial interest. It would be
typical of the man’s hard and comfortless life. It would be in perfect
harmony with his furrowed face, his bony limbs, and his stooping gait.
It would not only represent that particular ploughman in that particular
lane, but it would give a true though mournful impression of
farm-laborers generally.
I should much prefer for the subject of a picture, a common episode from
the life of a laborer to an uncommon one.
Again, if I wished to represent the same man at home, I should endeavor,
without exaggeration, to give the squalor of his surroundings, and
should not, out of my inner consciousness, evolve an ideal peasant
surrounded by a comely family, and looking (as Dickens has somewhere
said) as if he had “spent his little All in soap.”
Artists understand pretty well nowadays that in painting rustic
subjects, honesty is the best policy. The great success of the French
painter, Millet, was due entirely to his uncompromising honesty of
purpose, and to the unerring judgment with which he selected his
subjects.
There _are_ pretty girls (even in France) amongst the peasant class,
although they are certainly rare. There are plenty of _fête_ days when
every woman makes herself as smart as she can; but Millet knew better
than to paint pretty girls and smart dresses. Instead of this, he
depicted the true types of French peasantry, gaunt, hard-featured women,
dressed in the coarsest garments, and shod with wooden sabots. The
novelty of truth was unwelcome at first to the Parisian public. They had
so long been accustomed to Opera Comique peasants that they had lost
relish for the genuine article; but by degrees they began to perceive
that these uncouth figures were very like the Jeannes and the Victoires
they knew _à la campagne_. Moreover, they did not fail to observe that
the subjects chosen by the artist were of that homely, agricultural kind
peculiar to the French peasantry. They smelt of the village dunghill,
and this was the great secret of their success.
I am often told by people who don’t know much about art, that they have
thought of “such a capital subject for a picture,” and it generally
turns out to be something odd or incongruous, and not at all fitted for
painting. For several years we have had pictures sent in for exhibition,
representing children playing at judge and jury, police-courts,
auctions, etc. In these pictures the children are all dressed up to
represent policemen, barristers, plaintiffs, and defendants. Moreover,
they have so thoroughly learned their parts that their action is no
longer childlike. Some of these pictures are very well painted, but the
principle is so wrong and false that we now invariably refuse them
admission.
Children should, in a picture, be engaged on something childlike. Thus
it would be perfectly natural for children to play at being wild beasts,
making use of any bear or wolf skin which happened to be handy.
Coach-and-horses, hen-and-chickens, are again legitimate games for
children, and therefore proper for painting; but in the arts we don’t
want elaborately got-up burlesque.
A group of young children on the sea-sands, at work with their wooden
shovels, would by some be thought a stupid kind of subject, hardly
worthy of being painted at all; but make the same children overtaken by
the tide, with a steep cliff behind them, and probably you will have a
great success, especially if you make your little figures expressing
their fear or courage in a theatrical and unchildlike manner.
The first group would be a typical one--typical of the seaside and
childhood; the second would not be absolutely impossible (like the
bewigged and behelmeted youngsters above mentioned), but it would be
somewhat exceptional, and therefore, in my opinion, not so suitable for
painting as the first group.
In the same way with landscape, the spot you select for pitching your
umbrella should not be mean and ugly, neither should it be
overpoweringly grand and beautiful. Pictures representing the Falls of
Niagara or the gorges of the Rocky Mountains are generally failures. I
have in a former lecture praised the Belgian landscape-painters, and I
think that a good deal of their merit lies in the happy choice of
subjects. They are certainly not classical, like the old school of
French landscape-painters, nor do they affect the dreariest commonplace,
like some of the moderns. They neither paint precipices and snowy
mountains, nor dull stretches of poplar-skirted high-road. Their
pictures are to me most interesting, not only on account of their
technical excellence, but from the good taste shown in the selection of
the subjects.
Incidents which are out of harmony with the character of the persons
engaged, form capital materials for caricature. The late John Leech
showed the nicest discrimination in his selection of subjects. When he
gave us pictures of character, nothing could be better than his sporting
scenes, or his bits from the mining districts. When he wanted to raise a
laugh at something paradoxical, he would give us a lot of mutes making
merry after a respectable funeral, or a used-up swell eating periwinkles
with a pin on the top of a ’bus. In both these cases it was the sharp
contrast between the usual habits of the persons and their exceptional
occupation at the time which made the fun, and very good fun it was
too; but in an oil picture which takes some months to paint, the humor
ought to be of a more delicate kind. I know of no better example of the
kind of humor I mean than Wilkie’s “Blind Fiddler.”
Before closing my lecture I should wish to notice a certain kind of
pictures which do not fit in well with any of the classes I have
mentioned. The pictures I mean are those which are painted expressly to
teach some lesson, or to inculcate some moral precept. The great
originator of this kind of art was Hogarth. Before him nothing of the
sort had ever been done, and since his death no artist has equalled him
in this particular line. Much, however, as I admire Hogarth as a
painter, I cannot coincide with all the praise that has been showered on
him as a great moral teacher. He has often been compared to Molière, but
the great Frenchman attacked the vices and follies of his day with a
sharp rapier, whereas Hogarth wielded a heavy bludgeon. Indeed, I think
it very doubtful whether our art can be converted into an active agent
in the cause of morality. The touches of ridicule which a clever writer
uses with so much effect are very apt to become ponderous when embedded
in oil paint. Hogarth’s reputation may well be allowed to rest on his
numerous technical excellences without hoisting him upon a pedestal as a
great apostle of morality. In like manner the name of Cruickshank will
be preserved as the clever draughtsman and caricaturist, and not as the
champion of teetotalism.
In mitigation, however, of Hogarth’s sledge-hammer style of belaboring
vice, we must bear in mind that the age in which he lived was a very
gross and brutal one, and that his “Rake’s Progress,” his “Marriage à la
Mode,” and similar works, which to us appear exaggerated or caricatured,
were considered by his contemporaries to be very true to nature.
To return to the proper business this evening, which is not to criticise
painters and their work, but to discuss subjects for painting, I cannot
say I particularly delight in the class under notice.
Whoever takes up these subjects becomes (involuntarily perhaps) a kind
of missionary agent for the cause he takes up, whether it be
teetotalism, humanitarianism, or the redressing of the wrongs of our old
friend, the “poor governess”; and as with some other agents, his zeal
often outruns his discretion, and he is apt to thrust forward his moral
too obtrusively. When this kind of picture is painted in pairs, after
the fashion of Hogarth’s “Industrious and Idle Apprentice,” there is a
sort of poster or advertisement flavor about the work, reminding one a
little of “what I was, and what I am” in connection with Mrs. Allen’s
hairwash, or of “before and after using anti-fat.”
No one can, of course, object to such antithetic pictures as “Summer and
Winter,” “Peace and War,” “Youth and Age,” etc.; but where the practice
of showing both sides of the medal becomes objectionable, is when the
work is evidently intended to be didactic. I don’t know what effect
these didactic pictures may have on others, but I always feel a kind of
impatience at having the contrast between virtue and vice thrust before
me in this infant-school fashion.
I do not wish in these lectures to enter upon the domain of high-art
ethics; I have a very decided aversion to the union of painting with
abstruse theories of all kinds, but a few words on morality in art may
not be out of place.
It must be generally allowed that certain pictures have an immoral
tendency: we may, therefore conclude by analogy that others have a moral
tendency, but beyond this general truism it is difficult to get.
The art-loving portion of the public needs no Lord Chamberlain to
ostracise immoral subjects, but on the other hand, it is rather
intolerant of what are called “goody” pictures. Let us rather, instead
of preaching homilies with our brush, endeavor to set an example of
pictorial morality by adherence to truth, by abstaining from clap-trap
tricks and meretricious execution; by ceasing to pilfer ideas and modes
of painting from other artists, and by general honesty of purpose.
If we do this, we may rest assured that our work will have a healthier
influence than it would have if more directly enlisted in the cause of
morality.
LECTURE XI.
ON THE COMPOSITION OF DECORATIVE AND HISTORICAL PICTURES.
The art of composing figure-pictures may be divided into two categories,
to each of which I intend devoting a lecture.
The first category will comprise all decorative or semi-decorative work,
where grandeur and harmony of line is the great desideratum; the graphic
rendering of the subject being of minor importance.
The second category would include almost all easel pictures which aspire
to represent some historical event, or to illustrate some anecdote. In
these pictures the graphic rendering of the subject is the first
desideratum, and the pleasant harmony of line only the second.
We will deal this evening with the laws of composition for decorative
work.
I ought perhaps to avoid using the word “laws”; art is not an exact
science, and no strict law can be laid down about a matter of taste.
Still there are certain principles which seem to be accepted by all
masters of composition, and certain others which, although not generally
accepted, occur to me as likely to be of use to you.
The golden rule for the arrangement of figures in a picture, is that the
nature of the subject ought to dictate the lines of the composition. If
you have to paint a subject of a quiet, majestic, and dignified class, a
subject for all ages, where you wish to express perfect repose and
stability, you cannot do better than go back to the pyramid. This
pyramidical theory of composition has been much quizzed and laughed at,
but that is because the old-fashioned dilettanti who advocated it wanted
to apply it universally. Now it is clearly unsuitable for subjects of
action, or for filling with figures low long panels; but for altar
pieces, or for pictures which are destined for central places, it is at
once the most natural and the most effective method. The quiet and
serene dignity of many of the ancient Holy Families and other subjects
of sacred art is due mainly to the pyramidical form of grouping.
Sometimes the form is that of a truncated pyramid, as in the Hemicycle
at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where the object of the painter was to
represent an ideal Areopagus of Art.
In the compositions of Masaccio and Filippino Lippi we have good
examples of a horizontal style of arrangement. The structure of these
groups is suggestive of solid simple architectural forms, and has a kind
of dignity of its own; but though suitable enough for frescoes of the
fifteenth century, it is hardly picturesque or varied enough for modern
oil-pictures.
Mural paintings, particularly when they represent grave or sacred
subjects, should more or less partake of this horizontal and rectilinear
form of composition.
A certain amount of deviation is necessary, and it is in fixing the
limit of this deviation that the skill of the artist is shown.
Too little would make his composition formal and lifeless.
Too much would take away from the symmetry which befits such subjects.
The Stanze of Raffaelle are noble examples of skill and taste in
composition.
Nothing can be finer than his “School of Athens,” his “Parnassus,” and
his “Theology.”
Here we find variety of line combined with a dignified simplicity. It is
the arrangement and composition of these grand frescoes which in my
opinion justifies the position Raffaelle holds in the history of art,
rather than the beauty of his Madonnas or the bold drawing of his
somewhat over-rated cartoons.
Later artists of the Roman school overdid the picturesque element, and
lost the stately simplicity which characterizes the second manner of
Raffaelle.
In modern times, Ingres’ “Apotheosis of Homer” is a good example of what
a mural painting should be. Severe in drawing and dignified in
composition, it is yet by no means deficient in those more attractive
qualities which are commonly expressed by the word “picturesque.”
Flandrin’s frieze at St. Vincent de Paul is another magnificent specimen
of an exquisite sense of fitness. There is hardly a figure in the whole
procession of apostles, saints, and martyrs, which could be improved. I
know of no modern work which is so perfect of its kind.
It is, of course, preposterous to suppose that good composition can be
taught in a couple of evenings; but if I succeed in impressing on you
the importance of this rather neglected branch of study, I shall not
have lectured in vain.