likely to learn the truth about Turner from prosaic contemporaries of
his earlier years than from all the rhapsodies of later days. How
significant, when stripped of its amusing circumstances, is the simple
fact related thus by Leslie:--"In 1839, when Constable exhibited his
_Opening of Waterloo Bridge_, it was placed in one of the small rooms
next to a sea-piece by Turner--a grey picture, beautiful and true, but
with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable's picture seemed as
if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times
while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and
flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him looking from the
_Waterloo Bridge_ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette
from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a
round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey
sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of this red lead,
made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the
vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just
after Turner had left it. "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired
a gun." On the opposite wall was a picture by Jones of Shadrach Meshach
and Abednego in the Furnace. "A coal," said Cooper, "has bounced across
the room from Jones's picture and set fire to Turner's sea." Turner did
not come in again for a day and a half, and then in the last moment
allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his
picture, and shaped it into a buoy."
It was in 1835, after an unbroken popular triumph lasting over thirty
years, that the critics openly rounded on him. The occasion seized by
_Blackwood's Magazine_ was the exhibition of his first Venetian picture
exhibited in that year--it is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New
York. "What is Venice in this picture?" wrote Blackwood's critic. "A
flimsy, whitewashed, meagre assemblage of architecture, starting off
ghost-like into unnatural perspective, as if frightened at the affected
blaze of some dogger vessels (the only attempt at richness in the
picture). The greater part of the picture is white, disagreeable white,
without light or transparency, and the boats with their red worsted
masts are as gewgaw as a child's toy which he may have cracked to see
what it is made of. As to Venice, nothing can be more unlike its
character."
Ruskin was then only sixteen years old, but eight years later appeared
in print the first volume of "Modern Painters," "by an undergraduate of
Oxford," as the result of his growing indignation at this and subsequent
attacks on Turner. Without following Ruskin into the dubious regions
whither the pursuit of his romantic fancies ultimately led him, we may
in fairness quote the opening sentence of his second chapter, "Of Truth
of Colour," which will help us, moreover, in understanding the
conditions under which painting was being conducted at this period.
"There is nothing so high in art," he says, "but that a scurrile jest
can reach at, and often the greater the work the easier it is to turn it
into ridicule. To appreciate the science of Turner's colour would
require the study of a life; but to laugh at it requires little more
than the knowledge that the yolk of egg is yellow and spinage green; a
fund of critical information on which the remarks of most of our
leading periodicals have been of late years exclusively based. We
shall, however, in spite of the sulphur and treacle criticisms of our
Scotch connoisseurs, and the eggs and spinage of our English ones,
endeavour to test the works of this great colourist by a knowledge of
nature somewhat more extensive than is to be gained by an acquaintance,
however formed, with the apothecary's shop or the dinner table."
So much for the critics. For the artist, if Ruskin said more than Turner
himself could understand, he has summed up his achievement in a few
passages which may possibly outlast the works themselves. "There has
been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not, like some few
artists, been without childhood; his course of study has been as
evidently as it has been swiftly progressive; and in different stages of
the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another, has been
aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his
career he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. As he
advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what
succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never abandoned
without a gain: and his present works present the sum and perfection of
his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience and passion of
one who feels too much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause
for expression or ponder over his syllables." And again of his latest
works--"There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy; the
instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered
more; which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its
abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness
of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand and the vainness of
the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has
revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of
his life: he knows her now too well, he cannot falter over the material
littlenesses of her outward form: he must give her soul, or he has done
nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the earth, and the oil. 'I
cannot gather the beams out of the east, or I would make _them_ tell you
what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember
together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night sky, or I would
make that teach you what I have seen; but read this, interpret this, and
let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can
summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the
passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be
indistinct and swift, leave me; for I will give you no patient mockery,
no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am and whom I
serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their
master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me; but
remember that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery.'"
Within a very few years Ruskin was performing a more useful service for
the English School of painting than that of gilding the fine gold of its
greatest genius. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, young Holman
Hunt had borrowed a copy of "Modern Painters," which, he says, entirely
changed his opinions as to the views held by society at large concerning
art, and in 1849 there were exhibited Hunt's _Rienzi_, Rossetti's
_Girlhood of Mary Virgin_, and Millais' _Lorenzo and Isabella_, each
inscribed with the mystic letters "P.R.B.," meaning "Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood." It is interesting to note that this alliance was formed
when the three young artists were looking over a book of engravings of
the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa.
In the following year Hunt exhibited the _British Family_, Millais, _The
Carpenter's Shop_, and Rossetti the _Ecce Ancilla Domini_, and in 1851
were Hunt's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and three by Millais. The fury of
the critics had now reached a point at which some notice had to be taken
of it--as of a man in an apopleptic fit. That of the Times in
particular:--"These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by
addicting themselves to an antiquated style, false perspective, and
crude colour of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed
drapery "snapped instead of folded," faces bloated into apoplexy, or
extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's
shop, and expression forced into caricature. That morbid infatuation
which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity
deserves no quarter at the hands of the public." It was in disapproval
of the tone of this outburst that the author of "Modern Painters"
addressed his famous and useful letter to the _Times_, vindicating the
artists, and following it up with another in which he wishes them all
"heartily good speed, believing in sincerity that if they temper the
courage and energy which they have shown in the adoption of their
systems with patience and discretion in framing it, and if they do not
suffer themselves to be driven by harsh and careless criticism into
rejection of the ordinary means of obtaining influence over the minds of
others, they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the
foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three
hundred years."
If any one of this strenuous young band had been a painter of the first
rank, this prediction might have been abundantly verified. But it must
be owned that none of them was. Holman Hunt came nearest to being, and
Millais probably thought he was, when he had abandoned his early
principles and shaped for the Presidency of the Academy. Rossetti had
more genius in him than the others, but it came out in poetry as well as
in painting, and perhaps in more lasting form. As it was, the effects of
the revolution were widespread and entirely beneficial; but those
effects must not be looked for in the works of any one particular
artist, but rather in the general aspect of English art in the
succeeding half century, and perhaps to-day. It broke up the soil. The
flowers that came up were neither rare nor great, but they were many,
varied, and pleasing, and in every respect an improvement on the
evergreens and hardy annuals with which the English garden had become
more and more encumbered from want of intelligent cultivation. More than
this, the freedom engendered of revolt had now encouraged the young
artist to feel that he was no longer bound to paint in any particular
fashion. People's eyes were opened to possibilities as well as to
actualities; and though they were prone to close again under the
soporific influence of what was regular and conventional, they were
capable of opening again, perhaps with a start, but without the
necessity for a surgical operation. In 1847, for example, George
Frederick Watts had offered to adorn, free of charge, the booking-hall
of Euston Station, and had been refused--Watts, by the by, was quite
independent of the Pre-Raphaelites--whereas in 1860 the Benchers of
Lincoln's Inn accepted his _School of Legislature_, and in 1867 he was
elected an academician.
Two somewhat remarkable effects of the movement are attributed to it by
Mr Edmund Gosse (in a note on the work of Alfred Hunt, written in
1884), which are probably typical of many more. The Liverpool Academy,
founded in 1810, had an annual grant of L200 from the Corporation. In
1857 it gave a prize to Millais' _Blind Girl_ in preference to the most
popular picture of the year (Abraham Solomon's _Waiting for the
Verdict_), and so great was the public indignation that pressure was
brought to bear on the Corporation, the grant was withdrawn, and the
Academy ruined.
In the other instance we may not go the whole way with Mr Gosse, when in
speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite principle he says that "the school of
Turnerian landscape was fatally affected by them," or that all the
landscape painters, except Alfred Hunt, "accepted the veto which the
Pre-Raphaelites had tacitly laid upon composition or a striving after an
artificial harmony of forms in landscape." But to a certain extent their
influence undoubtedly was prejudicial in that respect. In suggesting
another reason for the cessation of Turner s influence he is quite as
near the mark, namely, the action of the Royal Academy in admitting no
landscape painters to membership. At Turner's death in 1851 there were
only three, among whom was Creswick. "This popular artist," says Mr
Gosse, "was the Upas tree under whose shadow the Academical patronage of
landscape died in England. From his election as an associate in 1842 to
that of Vicat Cole in 1869, no landscape painter entered the doors of
the Royal Academy." Of this august body we shall have something to say
later on.
IV
MANET AND WHISTLER AGAINST THE WORLD
Let us now cross the channel again, and see what is going on there, in
1863. Evidently there is something on, or there would not be so much
excitement. As we approach the Capital we are aware of one name being
prominent in the general uproar--that of EDOUARD MANET.
Manet's revolt against tradition began before he became an artist, as
was in fact necessary, or he would never have been allowed to become
one. The traditions of the Bourgoisie were sacred, and their power and
importance since the revolution of 1848 not to be lightly set aside. But
young Manet was so determined that he was at last allowed by his
bourgeois parents to have his way, and was sent to study under that very
rough diamond Couture. Now again his "revolting" qualities showed
themselves, this time in the life class. Theodore Duret, his friend and
biographer, puts it so amusingly that a quotation, untranslated, is
imperative:--"Cette repulsion qui se developpe chez Manet pour l'art de
la tradition," he says, "se manifeste surtout par le mepris qu'il
temoigne aux modeles posant dans l'atelier et a l'etude du nu telle
qu'elle etait alors conduite. Le culte de l'antique comme on le
comprenait dans la premiere moitie du XIXe siecle parmi les peintres
avait amene la recherche de modeles speciaux. On leur demandait des
formes pleines. Les hommes en particulier devaient avoir une poitrine
large et bombee, un torse puissant, des membres muscles. Les individus
doues des qualites requises qui posaient alors dans les ateliers,
s'etaient habitues a prendre des attitudes pretendues expressive et
heroiques, mais toujours tendues et conventionelles, d'ou l'imprevu
etait banni. Manet, porte vers le naturel et epris de recherches,
s'irritait de ces poses d'un type fixe et toujours les memes. Aussi
faisait-il tres mauvais menage avec les modeles. Il cherchait a en
obtenir des poses contraires a leurs habitudes, auxquelles ils se
refusaient. Les modeles connus qui avaient vu les morceaux faits d'apres
leurs torses conduire certains eleves a l'ecole de Rome, alors la
supreme recompense, et qui dans leur orgueil s'attribuaient presqu'une
part du succes, se revoltaient de voir un tout jeune homme ne leur
temoigner aucun respect. Il parait que fatigue de l'eternelle etude du
nu, Manet aurait essaye de draper et meme d'habiller les modeles, ce qui
aurait cause parmi eux une veritable indignation."
It was in 1863 that the storm of popular fury burst over Manet's head,
on the exhibition of his first important picture, painted three years
before, generally known as _Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe_. This wonderful
canvas was something so new and so surprising that it was rejected by
the jury of the Salon. But in company with less conspicuous though
equally unacceptable pieces by such men as Bracquemond, Cazin,
Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J. P. Laurens, Le Gros, Pissarro,
Vollon, and Whistler, it was accorded an exhibition, alongside the
official Salon, which was called _le Salon des refuses_. Being the
largest and most conspicuous work shown, it attracted no less attention
than if it had been officially hung, and probably much more. "Ainsi ce
Dejeuner sur l'herbe," says M. Duret, "venait-il faire comme une enorme
tache. Il donnait la sensation de quelquechose outre. Il heurtait la
vision. Il produisait, sur les yeux du public de ce temps, l'effet de la
pleine lumiere sur les yeux du hibou."
There was more than one reason for this remarkable picture surprising
and shocking the sensibilities of the public. It represents a couple of
men in everyday bourgeois costume, one sitting and the other reclining
on the grass under trees, while next to one of them is seated a young
woman, her head turned to the spectator, in no costume at all. A
profusion of _articles de dejeuner_ is beside her, and it is evident
that they are only waiting to arrange the meal till a second young
woman, who is seen bathing in the near background, is ready to join
them. The subject and composition are reminiscent of Giorgione's
beautiful and famous _Fete Champetre_, in the Louvre, and Manet quite
frankly and in quite good faith pleaded Giorgione as his precedent when
assailed on grounds of good taste. But unfortunately he had not put his
male figures in "fancy dress," and the public could hardly be expected
to realise that Giorgione had not, either. As for the painting, it was a
revelation. He had broken every canon of tradition--and yet it was a
marvellous success!
Another outburst greeted the appearance of the wonderful _Olympia_ in
1865, this time in the official catalogue. This is now enshrined in the
Louvre. It was painted in 1863, but fortunately, perhaps, Manet had not
the courage to exhibit it then--for who can tell to what length the fury
of the Philistines might not have been goaded by two such shocks? As it
was, this second violation of the sacred traditions of the nude, which
had been exclusively reserved for allegorical subjects, was considered
an outrage; and the innocent, natural model, of by no means voluptuous
appearance, was regarded as a disgraceful intrusion into the chaste
category of nymphs and goddesses. As a painter, however, Manet had shown
himself unmistakably as the great figure of
[Illustration: PLATE XLVIII.--EDOUARD MANET
OLYMPIA
_Louvre, Paris_]
the age, and if we have to go to Paris or to New York to catch a glimpse
of any of his work, it is partly because we are too backward in seizing
opportunities so eagerly snapped up by others.
The next great storm in the artistic world followed in the wake of one
of Manet's companions in adversity at the _Salon des Refuses_--JAMES
M'NEILL WHISTLER, who left Paris and settled with his mother in Chelsea
in the late 'sixties. That he should have existed for fifteen whole
years without breaking forth into strife is so extraordinary that we are
almost tempted to attribute it to the influence of his mother, who used
to bring him to the old church on Sundays, as the present writer dimly
remembers. In this case it was not the public, but the critic, John
Ruskin, who so deftly dropped the fat into the fire. Having, as we saw,
taken up the cudgels for poor Turner against the public in 1843, and for
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1850, he now, in 1877, ranged himself
on the other side, and accused Whistler of impertinence in "flinging a
pot of paint in the face of the public." The action for libel which
Whistler commenced in the following year resulted in strict fact in a
verdict of one farthing damages for the libelled one; but in reality the
results were much farther reaching. The artist had vindicated not only
himself, but his art, from the attacks of the ignorant and bumptious.
"Poor art!" Whistler wrote, "What a sad state the slut is in, an these
gentlemen shall help her. The artist alone, by the way, is to no purpose
and remains unconsulted; his work is explained and rectified without
him, by the one who was never in it--but upon whom God, always good
though sometimes careless, has thrown away the knowledge refused to the
author, poor devil!" This recalls Turner's comment on Ruskin's
eulogies--which Whistler had probably never heard of--and making every
allowance for Whistler's fiery, combative nature, and sharp pen, there
is much truth, and truth that needed telling, in his contention. "Art,"
he continues, "that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and
written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and
stammer, and wait for wisdom from the passer-by? For guidance from the
hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? Out upon the shallow conceit!"
Of the hopeless banality of the critics during this period there are
plenty of examples to be found without looking very far. Several of the
most amusing have been embodied in a little volume of "Whistler
Stories," lately compiled by Mr Don C. Seitz of New York. Here we find
_The Standard's_ little joke about Whistler paying his costs in the
action--apart from those allowed on taxation, that is to say--"But he
has only to paint, or, as we believe he expresses it 'knock off' three
or four 'symphonies' or 'harmonies'--or perhaps he might try his hand at
a Set of Quadrilles in Peacock Blue?--and a week's labour will set all
square." Then there is this priceless revelation of his art when
questioning his class in Paris. "Do you know what I mean when I say
tone, value, light, shade, quality, movement, construction, etc.?"
_Chorus_, "Oh, yes, Mr Whistler!" "I'm glad, for it's more than I do
myself." More serious was the verdict of Sir George Scharf, keeper of
the National Gallery, when (in 1874) there was a proposal to purchase
the portrait of Carlyle. "Well," he said, icily, on looking at the
picture, "and has painting come to this!"
High place, it would seem, did not always conduce to an appreciation of
high art. Here is the opinion of Sir Charles Eastlake, F.R.I.B.A., also
keeper of the
[Illustration: PLATE XLIX.--J. M. WHISTLER
LILLIE IN OUR ALLEY
_In the possession of John J. Cowan, Esq._]
National Gallery, published in 1883, on one of Rembrandt's pictures in
the Louvre:--
"_The Bath_, a very ugly and offensive picture, in which the principal
object is the ill-proportioned figure of a naked woman, distinguished by
flesh tones whose colour suggests the need of a bath rather than the
fact that it has been taken. The position of the old servant wiping the
woman's feet is not very intelligible, and the drawing of the bather's
legs is distinctly defective. The light and shade of the picture, though
obviously untrue to natural effect, are managed with the painter's usual
dexterity."
V
THE ROYAL ACADEMY
The last revolt of the nineteenth century was effected in a peaceable
and business-like, but none the less successful manner, by the
establishment, in 1886, of the New English Art Club as a means of
defence against the mighty _vis inertiae_ of the Royal Academy. As an
example of the disadvantage under which any artist laboured who did not
bow down to the great Idol, I venture to quote a few sentences from the
report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to
inquire into the administration of the Chantrey Trust, in 1904:----
"With five exceptions, all the works in the collection have been bought
from summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy."
"It is admitted by those most friendly to the present system that the
Chantrey collection regarded as a national gallery of modern British art
is incomplete, and in a large degree unrepresentative. The works of
many of the most brilliant and capable artists who worked in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century are missing from the gallery, and the
endeavour to account for these omissions has formed one main branch of
the inquiry."
"It has been stated that while containing some fine works of art, it is
lacking in variety and interest, and while failing to give expression to
much of the finest artistic feeling of its period, it includes not a few
works of minor importance. Full consideration of the evidence has led
the Committee to regard this view as approximately correct."
Up to 1897, when the collection was handed over to the nation, little
short of L50,000 had been spent upon it. And with five exceptions,
amounting to less than L5000, the whole of that money had been expended
on such works alone as were permitted by the Academy to be exhibited on
their walls.
Of the L5000, it may be noted, L2200 was well laid out on Watts's
_Psyche_; but with regard to the very first purchase made, in 1877, for
L1000,--Hilton's _Christ Mocked_, which had been painted as an
altar-piece for S. Peter's, Eaton Square, in 1839, the following
question and answer are full of bitter significance for the poor artist
of the time:----
Lord Ribblesdale.--Was Mr Hilton's picture offered by the Vicar and
Churchwardens?
The Secretary to the Royal Academy.--Yes, it was offered by
them--one of the Churchwardens was the late Lord Maghermorne--he
was then Sir James M'Garrell Hogg--he was a great friend of Sir
Francis Grant who was the President, and he offered it to him for
the Chantrey Collection.
When repeatedly pressed by the Committee for the reasons why so few
purchases were made outside the Academy exhibitions, the President, Sir
Edward Poynter, repeatedly pleaded the impossibility of a Council of
Ten, all of whom must see pictures before they are bought, travelling
about in search of them. In view of this apparent--but obviously
unreal--difficulty, the following questions were then put by the Earl of
Lytton:----
420. Without actually changing the terms of the will, has the question
of employing an agent for the purpose of finding out what pictures were
available and giving advice upon them ever been suggested?--No.