great reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his work
that they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rank
that used to be assigned him among the world's greatest artists. It is,
after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title to
fame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation in
which that quality is held. It was because composition was to him a
comparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought little
of Raphael. It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct element
of art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters and
critics decry Raphael altogether. The decorators have always known that
design is the essence of their art, and therefore they have always
appreciated the greatest of designers. That is why Paul Baudry, in the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based his
own art upon that of the great Umbrian. To-day, in our own country,
mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for the
appropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works of
painting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at any
time since the Italian Renaissance. So surely as the interest in
decorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become more
widely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine again
with something of its ancient splendor.
But design is something more than the essential quality of mural
decoration--it is the common basis of all the arts, the essential thing
in art itself. Each of the arts has its qualities proper to it alone,
and it may be right to estimate the painter, the sculptor, the
architect, or the musician according to his eminence in those qualities
which are distinctive of his particular art and which separate it most
sharply from the other arts. In that sense we are right to call Frans
Hals a greater painter than Raphael. But if we estimate a man's artistry
by the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expresses
itself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes or
forms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must we
place Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but a
choice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. If we no
longer call him "the prince of painters" we must call him one of the
greatest artists among those who have practised the art of painting.
V
TWO WAYS OF PAINTING
Among the modern paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant and
altogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "The
Hermit" (Pl. 21). Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and the
public knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader of
human character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, on
occasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in the
wonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts
and Sciences, one fancies one sees the essential John Sargent, working
for himself alone without regard to external demands, and doing what he
really cares most to do. In such work he is a modern of the moderns
and, in the broadest sense of the word, a thorough Impressionist. Not
that he shows himself a disciple of Monet or occupies himself with the
broken touch or the division of tones--his method is as direct as that
of Sorolla and his impressionism is of the same kind--a bending of all
his energies to the vivid realization of the effect of the scene
rendered as one might perceive it in the first flash of vision if one
came upon it unexpectedly. This picture is better than Sorolla--it is
better than almost any one. It is perhaps the most astonishing
realization of the modern ideal, the most accomplished transcript of the
actual appearance of nature, that has yet been produced. It is because
of its great merit, because of its extraordinary success in what it
attempts, that it leads one to the serious consideration of the nature
of the attempt and of the gain and loss involved in the choice that
modern art has made.
The picture is exactly square--the choice of this form is, of itself,
typically modern in its unexpectedness--and represents a bit of rough
wood interior under intense sunlight. The light is studied for its
brilliancy rather than for its warmth, and if the picture has a fault,
granted the point of view of the painter, it is in a certain coldness of
color; but such conditions of glaring and almost colorless light do
exist in nature. One sees a few straight trunks of some kind of pine or
larch, a network of branches and needles, a tumble of moss-spotted and
lichened rocks, a confusion of floating lights and shadows, and that is
all. The conviction of truth is instantaneous--it is an actual bit of
nature, just as the painter found it. One is there on that ragged
hillside, half dazzled by the moving spots of light, as if set down
there suddenly, with no time to adjust one's vision. Gradually one's
eyes clear and one is aware, first of a haggard human head with tangled
beard and unkempt hair, then of an emaciated body. There is a man in the
wood! And then--did they betray themselves by some slight
movement?--there are a couple of slender antelopes who were but now
invisible and who melt into their surroundings again at the slightest
inattention. It is like a pictorial demonstration of protective coloring
in men and animals.
[Illustration: Plate 21.--Sargent. "The Hermit."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Now, almost any one can see how superbly all this is rendered. Any one
can marvel at and admire the free and instantaneous handling, the web of
slashing and apparently meaningless brush strokes which, at a given
distance, take their places by a kind of magic and _are_ the things they
represent. But it takes a painter to know how justly it is observed. In
these days no painter, whatever may be his deepest convictions, can
escape the occasional desire to be modern; and most of us have
attempted, at one time or another, the actual study of the human figure
in the open air. We have taken our model into a walled garden or a deep
wood or the rocky ravine of a brook and have set ourselves seriously to
find out what a naked man or woman really looks like in the setting of
outdoor nature. And we have found just what Sargent has painted. The
human figure, as a figure, has ceased to exist. Line and structure and
all that we have most cared for have disappeared. Even the color of
flesh has ceased to count, and the most radiant blond skin of the
fairest woman has become an insignificant pinkish spot no more important
than a stone and not half so important as a flower. Humanity is absorbed
into the landscape.
Obviously, there are two courses open to the painter. If he is a modern
by feeling and by training, full of curiosity and of the scientific
temper, caring more for the investigation of the aspects of nature and
the rendering of natural light and atmosphere than for the telling of a
story or the construction of a decoration, he will, if he is able
enough, treat his matter much as Sargent has treated it. The figure will
become, for him, only an incident in the landscape. It will be important
only as a thing of another texture and another color, valuable for the
different way in which it receives the light and reflects the sky, just
as rocks and foliage and water and bare earth are valuable. For to the
true Impressionist light and atmosphere are the only realities, and
objects exist only to provide surfaces for the play of light and
atmosphere. He will abandon all attempt at rendering the material and
physical significance of the human form and will still less concern
himself with its spiritual significance. He will gain a great vividness
of illusion, and he may console himself for what he loses with the
reflection that he has expressed the true relation of man to the
universe--that he has expressed either man's insignificance or man's
oneness with nature, according as his temper is pessimistic or
optimistic.
If, on the other hand, the painter is one to whom the figure as a figure
means much; one to whom line and bulk and modelling are the principal
means of expression, and who cares for the structure and stress of bone
and muscle; if the glow and softness of flesh appeal strongly to him;
above all, if he has the human point of view and thinks of his figures
as people engaged in certain actions, having certain characters,
experiencing certain states of mind and body; then he will give up the
struggle with the truths of aspect that seem so vital to the painter of
the other type and, by a frank use of conventions, will seek to
increase the importance of his figure at the expense of its
surroundings. He will give it firmer lines and clearer edges, will
strengthen its light and shade, will dwell upon its structure or its
movement and expression. He will so compose his landscape as to
subordinate it to his figure and will make its lines echo and accentuate
that figure's action or repose. When he has accomplished his task he
will have painted not man insignificant before nature but man dominating
nature.
For an example of this way of representing man's relation to the world
about him, let us take Titian's "Saint Jerome" (Pl. 22)--a picture
somewhat similar to Sargent's in subject and in the relative size of the
figure and its surroundings. Titian has here given more importance to
the landscape than was common in his day. He also has meant, as Sargent
has, to make a great deal of the wilderness to which his saint has
retired, and to make his saint a lonely human being in a savage place.
But the saint and his emotion is, after all, what interests Titian most,
and the wildness of nature is valuable to him mainly for its sympathy
with this emotion. He wants to give a single powerful feeling and to
give it with the utmost dramatic force--to give it theatrically even,
one might admit of this particular picture; for it is by no means so
favorable an example of Titian's method, or of the older methods of art
in general, as is Sargent's "Hermit" of the modern way of seeing and
painting. To attain this end he simplifies and arranges everything. He
lowers the pitch of his coloring to a sombre glow and concentrates the
little light upon his kneeling figure. He spends all his knowledge on so
drawing and modelling that figure as to make you feel to the utmost its
bulk and reality and the strain upon its muscles and tendons, and he
so places everything else on his canvas as to intensify its action and
expression. The gaze of the saint is fixed upon a crucifix high on the
right of the picture, and the book behind him, the lines of the rocks,
the masses of the foliage, even the general formation of the ground, are
so disposed as to echo and reinforce the great diagonal. There is a
splendid energy of invention in the drawing of the tree stems, but the
effect is clear and simple with nothing of Sargent's dazzle and
confusion. As for the lion, he is a mere necessary mark of
identification, and Titian has taken no interest in him.
[Illustration: Plate 22.--Titian. "St. Jerome in the Desert."
In the Brera Gallery, Milan.]
Now, it is evident that there is not nearly so much literal truth to the
appearance of nature in this picture as in Sargent's. It is not only
that it would never have occurred to Titian to try to paint the
glittering spottiness of sunlight splashing through leafage, or to
attempt to raise his key of light to something like that of nature, at
the cost of fulness of color. It is not merely that he translates and
simplifies and neglects certain truths that the world had not yet
learned to see. He deliberately and intentionally falsifies. He knew as
well as we do that a natural landscape would not arrange itself in such
lines and masses for the purpose of throwing out the figure and of
enhancing its emotion. But to him natural facts were but so much
material, to be treated as he pleased for the carrying out of his
purpose. He was a colorist and a chiaroscurist; and he had a great deal
more interest in light and in landscape than most of the painters of his
time. If he had been pre-eminently a draughtsman, like Michelangelo, he
would have reduced his light and shade to the amount strictly necessary
to give that powerful modelling of the figure which is the draughtsman's
means of expression, would have greatly increased the relative size and
importance of the figure, and would have reduced the landscape to a
barely intelligible symbol. Had he been a linealist, like Botticelli, he
would have eliminated modelling almost altogether, would have
concentrated his attention upon the edges of things, and would have
reduced his picture to a flat pattern in which the beauty and
expressiveness of the lines should be almost the only attraction.
For all art is an exchange of gain against loss--you cannot have
Sargent's truth of impression and Titian's truth of emotion in the same
picture, nor Michelangelo's beauty of structure with Botticelli's beauty
of line. To be a successful artist is to know what you want and to get
it at any necessary sacrifice, though the greatest artists maintain a
noble balance and sacrifice no more than is necessary. And if a painter
of to-day is like-minded with these older masters he will have to
express himself much in their manner. He will have to make, with his
eyes open, the sacrifices which they made, more or less unconsciously,
and to deny a whole range of truths with which his fellows are occupied
that he may express clearly and forcibly the few truths which he has
chosen.
All truths are good, and all ways of painting are legitimate that are
necessary to the expression of any truth. I am not here concerned to
show that one way is better than another or one set of truths more
important than another set of truths. For the present I am desirous only
of showing why there is more than one way--of explaining the necessity
of different methods for the expression of different individualities and
different ways of envisaging nature and art. But a little while ago it
was the modern or impressionistic manner that needed explanation. It
was new, it was revolutionary, and it was misunderstood and disliked. A
generation of critics has been busy in explaining it, a generation of
artists has been busy in practising it, and now the balance has turned
the other way. The pressure of conformity is upon the other side, and it
is the older methods that need justification and explanation. The
prejudices of the workers and the writers have gradually and naturally
become the prejudices of at least a part of the public, and it has
become necessary to show that the small minority of artists who still
follow the old roads do so not from ignorance or stupidity or a stolid
conservatism, still less from mere wilful caprice, but from necessity,
because those roads are the only ones that can lead them where they wish
to go. No more magnificent demonstration of the qualities possible to
the purely modern methods of painting has been made than this brilliant
little picture of Sargent's. All the more is it a demonstration of the
qualities impossible to these methods. If such qualities have any
permanent value and interest for the modern world it is a gain for art
that some painters should try to keep alive the methods that render
possible their attainment.
VI
THE AMERICAN SCHOOL
In the catalogues of our museums you may find entries like this: "John
Smith, American school; The Empty Jug" or what-not. In such entries
little more than a bare statement of nationality is intended. John Smith
is an American, by birth or adoption; that is all that the statement is
meant to convey. But the question occurs: Have we an American school in
a more specific sense than this? Have we a body of painters with certain
traits in common and certain differences from the painters of other
countries? Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity and
sufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name of
American school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a French
school and an English school?
Under the conditions of to-day there are no longer anywhere such
distinctive local schools as existed in the Renaissance. In Italy, in
those days, there were not only such great schools as the Venetian, the
Florentine, and the Umbrian, differing widely in their point of view,
their manner of seeing, and their technical traditions--each little town
had a school with something characteristic that separated its painters
from those of other schools in the surrounding towns. To-day every one
knows and is influenced by the work of every one else, and it is only
broad national characteristics that still subsist. Modern pictures are
singularly alike, but, on the whole, it is still possible to tell an
English picture from a French one, and a German or Italian picture from
either. We may still speak of a Dutch school or a Spanish school with
some reasonableness. Is it similarly and equally reasonable to speak of
an American school? Does a room full of American pictures have a
different look from a room full of pictures by artists of any other
nationality? Does one feel that the pictures in such a room have a
something in common that makes them kin and a something different that
distinguishes them from the pictures of all other countries? I think the
answer must be in the affirmative.
We have already passed the stage of mere apprenticeship, and it can no
longer be said that our American painters are mere reflections of their
European masters. Twenty or even ten years ago there may have been some
truth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had no
foreign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of a
particular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it would
be difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to a
catalogue. They have, through long work in America and under American
conditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverable
resemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specific
examples, who would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or the
decorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either had
been a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes or
delicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name of
Gérôme? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters we
have who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work which
still marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishable
to-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified by
John Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolus
simply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painters
who have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified its
technic to suit their own purposes and are at least as different from the
Impressionists of France as are the Impressionists of Scandinavia. We have
painters who are undeniably influenced by Whistler, but so have other
countries--the school of Whistler is international--and, after all, Whistler
was an American. In short, the resemblances between American painting and
the painting of other countries are to-day no greater than the resemblances
between the painting of any two of those countries. And I think the
differences between American painting and that of other countries are quite
as great as, if not greater than, the differences between the paintings of
any two of those countries.
Another accusation that used to be heard against our painters has been
out-lived. We used to be told, with some truth, that we had learned to
paint but had nothing to say with our painting, that we produced
admirable studies but no pictures. The accusation never was true of our
landscape-painting. Whatever may be the final estimation of the works of
Inness and Wyant, there can be no doubt that they produced
pictures--things conceived and worked out to give one definite and
complete impression; things in which what was presented and what was
eliminated were equally determined by a definite purpose; things in
which accident and the immediate dominance of nature had little or no
part. As for Winslow Homer, whether in landscape or figure painting, his
work was unfailingly pictorial, whatever else it might be. He was a
great and original designer, and every canvas of his was completely and
definitely composed--a quality which at once removes from the category
of mere sketches and studies even his slighter and more rapid
productions. And our landscape-painters of to-day are equally painters
of pictures. Some of them might be thought, by a modern taste, too
conventionally painters of pictures--too much occupied with composition
and tone and other pictorial qualities at the expense of freshness of
observation--while our briskest and most original observers have, many
of them, a power of design and a manner of casting even their freshest
observations into pictorial form that is as admirable as it is
remarkable.
No one could enter one of our exhibitions without feeling the definitely
pictorial quality of American landscape-painting, but these exhibitions
do less justice to the achievement of our figure-painters. The principal
reason for this is that many of our most serious figure-painters have
been so much occupied with mural decoration that their work seldom
appears in the exhibitions at all, while the work that they have done is
so scattered over our vast country that we rather forget its existence
and, assuredly, have little realization of its amount. It is one of the
defects of our exhibition system that work of this kind, while it is, of
course, on permanent exhibition in the place for which it is painted, is
hardly ever "exhibited," in the ordinary sense, in the centres where it
is produced. The regular visitor to the Paris salons might know almost
all that has been done in France in the way of mural painting. The
public of our American exhibitions knows only vaguely and by hearsay
what our mural painters have done and are doing. It is true that such
work is infinitely better seen in place, but it is a pity it cannot be
seen, even imperfectly, by the people who attend our exhibitions--people
who can rarely have the necessary knowledge to read such collections of
sketches, studies, and photographs as are shown at the exhibitions of
the Architectural League, where, alone, our mural painters can show
anything. If it were seen it would surely alter the estimation in which
American figure-painting is held. Such work as was done by the late John
La Farge, such work as is being done by Blashfield and Mowbray and
Simmons and a dozen others, if not, in the most limited sense of the
word, pictorial, is even further removed from the mere sketch or
study--the mere bit of good painting--than is the finest easel picture.
But it is not only in mural decoration that serious figure-painting is
being done in this country. I do not see how any one can deny the name
of pictures to the genre paintings of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Paxton unless
he is prepared to deny pictorial quality to the whole Dutch school of
the seventeenth century; and the example of these men is influencing a
number of others toward the production of thoroughly thought-out and
executed genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure-painters
as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting
figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows
an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either the
naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects
intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern
and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and
harmoniously colored as well as admirably painted.
The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters or
students learning technic and indifferent to anything else. They are a
school producing work differing in character from that of other schools
and at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day.