Let us ... examine modern portraits. I shut my eyes and think of those
full lengths in the New Gallery and the Academy, which I have not seen
this year, but whose every detail is familiar to me. You will find that
a uniform light stretches from their chins to their toes; in all
probability the background is a slab of grey into whose insensitive
surface neither light nor air penetrates; or perhaps that most offensive
portrait-painter's property, a sham room in which none of the furniture
has been seen in its proper relation of light to the face, but has been
muzzed in with slippery insincerity, and with an amiable hope that it
may take its place behind the figure. The face, in all but one or two
portraits, will lack definition of plane--will be flat and flabby. A
white spot on the nose and high light on the forehead will serve for
modelling; little or no attempt will have been made to get a light which
will help the observer to concentrate on the head, or give the head its
full measure of rotundity--your eyes will wander aimlessly from cheek to
chiffon, from glinting satin to the pattern on the floor, forgetful of
the purpose of the portrait, and only arrested by some dab of pink or
mauve, which will remind you that the artist is developing a somewhat
irrelevant colour scheme.
For solidity, for the realisation of the great constructive planes of
things, for that element of sculpture which exists in all good painting,
you will look in vain. I am sure that in an average Academy there are
not three real attempts to get the values--that is, the inevitable
relation of objects in light and shade that must exist under any
circumstances--and not one attempt to contrive an artificial composition
of light and shade which shall concentrate the attention of the
spectator on the crucial point, and shall introduce these delightful
effects of dark things against light and light against dark, which lend
such richness and variety of tone and such vitality of construction to
Titian, Rembrandt, and Reynolds. If we turn for a moment to the National
Gallery and look at Gainsborough's "Baillie Family," or Reynolds' "Three
Ladies decorating the Term of Hymen," we see at once the difference; in
Gainsborough's case the group is in a mellow flood of light, there are
no strong shadows on any of the faces, and none of the figures are used
to cast shadows on other figures in the group; and yet as you look you
see the whole light of the picture culminating in the central head of
the mother, the sides and bottom of the picture fade off into artificial
shadow, exquisitely used, without which that glorious light would have
been dissipated over the picture, losing all its effectiveness and
carrying power. See how finely he has understood the reticent tones of
the man behind, and how admirably the loosely painted convention of
landscape background is made to carry on the purely artificial
arrangement of light and shade. In the Reynolds the shadowed figure on
the left, and the shadows that flit across the skirts of the other two
figures, and the fine relief of the dark trees, give a wonderful
richness of design to a picture that is not in other respects of the
highest interest.
_C. W. Furse._